I love you like I love poetry.

And I love you like I love
poetry. Because you are
complex, a tidy, precise combination
of many words and
memories and meanings.
And I try so meticulously
to pick you to pieces, to slice
your words into halves and quarters,
to dissect you until you are
clean, shining tendons and bones
of meanings, of feelings.
And you seem to come apart
in a heap in my hands. And
you lose some fragment of your beauty
when I pull you apart.

But
there are moments of quick inspection
when i see the fullness of you, when i take it all
in at once -- moments when I see each word,
each bone and meaning, and you are everything
I've ever seen in this world:
and all
I want to see.

I wish I wish that I could be with someone who uncomplicated me. Who stood in focus when I am fuzzy and flustered. Who sees my lines and curves when I cannot. I wish I wish that I could find a sophisticated soul, a like mind, an easy voice, a breath that blows through me like a breeze and sometimes like whirlwind. I wish I wish I had a friend, a man who holds me as friends do, who cups my face and inquires after my days and storms off in fights but rushes back in the end.

I wish I wish for an easy move to eternity from solitude, from emptiness to, bit by bit, being filled and becoming fit. To circled and confined from being free. To being one whole from being just me.

From the Daughter He Abandoned, to the One who Called Him to Sea

You called my father to live like a fisherman
And leave me alone with my mom.
He followed you out on the raging sea
As your cause shook the world like a bomb.
As he followed your path, you spoke love.
You said it was all that he'd need.
But at the end of the day, he fell victim like me
To the Man with the mustard seed.

You say your love for him is stronger
Than his love for his own daughter,
So I wait for my prodigal father
To come home.

I think I may have known you once,
And true I left you once or twice--
I chose to live inside a fish
Instead of taking your advice.
So I slept in his belly and prayed for three days
As from your haggard face I hid
That you would cast your net and catch my fish
But you never did.

You taught him how to fish in water
For the souls of sons and daughters.
I scan the seas and pray my father
Will come home.

As you prayed your last in the garden
With the blood flowing to your knees,
He fell asleep and dreamed of heaven,
Dreamed of passion, dreamed of peace.
When they came for you, he fled from them
And left you embracing a tree.
Now was it worth to steal a father
Who betrayed you as he betrayed me?

Those who leave not son and daughter
For the sake of Me and My Father
Will never taste the eternal waters
Of my home.

There's three of you and only one of me.
So tell me how was I ever supposed to compete?
Your loving call drew my father out to sea,
And that loving call made a bastard out of me.

Lion of Judah

I freeze
As my feet hit the snow-covered floor of the den.
There are lions here,
Waiting to attack.
I feel their breath on my skin,
The pulse of their
Giant lion paws
Padding along the ground
Behind me,
Circling.
There paws that will
Move me
Toward their lion bodies
And their
Great manes.

And I am
Frozen.
Because it is snowing
And there are lions
And there is no place to run.

If I were Samson,
I'd rip you apart
And eat the honey from your side;
Or one of David's mighty men

Who could tear at you

With big bare hands;
And I would pull

Myself from this den
Just like Daniel did.

I
am no Daniel or David, and

I
am no destroyer of columns;
I cannot scale the walls of this den.

I cannot rip through your skin
(As if you had skin)
And eat my fill of the sweetness
From your wounded side.
So I stand here
As you circle me,
Frozen before your
Great padding feet,
And beg you to
Devour me.

"I used to be a poet,"
she says, tapping
a half-empty cigarette
on the edge of the table.
She squints against the gleam of sun
shining through the smoke
of the second cigarette of the morning.
"It all went up in smoke--
like this smoke," she says,
watching the air from her mouth
float up to her eyes
and become part of the atmosphere.

I don't write.
I skim
the surface of
dark waters;
I hover
over a sea,
contained and
bound, that pulses
against my skin.
I imagine a skiff
skimming the sea,
blowing its hair
back in its wake.
But I don't write.

Nothing feels quite beautiful
(like the yellow waves
of early morning on open waters,
free and flowing
like mermaid hair).
Everything here
is driven by an undercurrent
beating against a shrinking shore.

I don't write
because I can't see to.
I see desert
and evaporating salt water
and a dark always evening
and a tiny boat
that will soon be resting
on the floor of a sea
that once was brimming and full
but now is sand.

"Sand is easier
to walk on than water,"
I say.
"No one sinks
in sand anymore."
Better to rest my bones
in the sun
than sink silently
into a quiet black sea.

At My Kitchen Window

From where I sit, Autumn is beautiful:
By every shade, by every scent dappled,
And shrouded in a mystery distinct from every other earthly mystery.
The seasons all stir in jealousy in her presence,
For she encompasses in all of her mysteries all of theirs:
She sings in the citrus flavors of summer,
The oranges hot and sparkling like globed fruit against her gray sky;
And burgundy blossoms fill the air with the scent of new life,
Hanging from the trees and assailing the ground in a shower,
Fallen yet triumphant;
And the brown crunch beneath the feet of all her jubilant children
Prepares the ground for winter.

Nature, all your seasons surround the Autumn thrust:
They crawl before her, stand in awe
And clamor to be nearer to her encompassing mystery.

In Memoriam R.M.R.

You, German panther-author,
You who grabbed in wide white fists the Truth of the thing,
You with great eyes racing over images
To make the image eternal, and the eternal ours:
You were struck down in your haste for a flower,
Struck down to touch the beauty of the artifice.
You bled its crimson color and died there in the soil
To gather in your body all that is life:
You, the teeming silt of flowering earth,
You, the eternal Truth of the thing.

To the Elegant Woman Whom I May Resemble

Everything elegant was in her hands--
Your hand, for instance, was there;
A flowered plastic cup or a flower from the ground;
Her glasses, round and graceful, fingered delicately.
And it is in those memories of her (of
The two of you when first in love)
That quickens my pace for something elegant of my own.
Do you know the glimmer behind her still eyes,
Even now? Do you
Remember a set of still eyes veiled behind
Porcelain lace?

And it is those images of her
That startle and stun me:
That you see a bit of her--in me?
The place I'm standing is the place I'll never leave,
Because it is where she planted me
Like a flower in her ground,
Springing up
And safely grasped and fingered in her hands
(Which only hold all elegant things).

The Way to Love, Like the Sea

There is no other way of loving but the way I love you:
Unreservedly, with loud voices, with laughing;
With arms flung wide to encompass the oceans
And then to circle back ‘round to touch together the fingers;
And thus to encircle the world
And every love and every laugh
And to hand it over in a spectacular upheaval
As an eternal gift to the beloved one.
It is the way of all loves, the way
Of a little girl flinging her arms ‘round the neck of a stranger
And saying is a voice as petit as her frame: “Ah!”, the way
Of a broken woman who flings her body ‘round another strange body
And cries out in passion she does not understand: “My love!”, the way
The dying lover buries her lover and flings her spindly arms ‘round the casket that closes him
And announces to his open grave: “My life, I love you!”
It is the way of the poets who express
But have not the words to do their expressing;
It is the way of a doctor or a lawyer forsakes their work
And lies down beside his woman
And sighs in a contentment that dislodges the day
Of every misery and unlovely disaster.
It is unutterable, and so I scream syllables to the silent surf;
It is uknowable, and so I close my eyes to my pounding veins;
It is untouchable, untasteable, nonsensical,
And so I fling my arms wide to it, swim in the sea of it,
Scream in the absurdity and in the fury.
It is the depths of peace, the love of loving you.
It is the look of longing in my eyes as I think of your large eyes,
Sparkling like sunrise over all the oceans
That I offer you, gathering them into my arms,
Encircled by my deep, by my sea, by my soft silent surf.
There is no other way of loving but the way I love you.

Light

If I am a lighthouse,
Are you the storm or the sea?
Are we two constants, you and me?:
One tall tower of light shining
And one deep swell
Moving moving against me.
Or are we two separate, one from the other?:
You a passing frenzy, a stacatto dance
And me that same tall tower of shining light.

Or am I the tower, tall and empty,
White and charming to photograph,
My face turned upwards to the sea;

While you are the pillar of light that is in me
That comes vaguely and brightly
To light up the sea upon which
I turn my wide eyes?

Adaptability

Happiness is your arm's length
And the width of your large hands
And the density of your smiles.
It is the light of your hair turned gray,
It is our moments together,
And the moments compose our years
And our laugh lines and gray hairs.

Happiness is my flowered gown
And the yellow of the sun
Under which we lay in the solemn quiet
Of our vows.

Happiness is the quietness of our glances,
The gazes we know,
The anger and penitence,
The sorrow and the moments unending.

Happiness is the devotion of our knotted hearts
Tied in inextricable bands
Stronger than gold or death.

Untitled

Yours is the song I hear inside me, a prayer:
Your voice is the cry of many saints,
Your lines are the words of all poets.
The song blows through me like wind to lift my head,
And I feel in it all the warmth of your summer breath,
Your breath of grasses and wildflowers and breeze.
The song echoes like hymns sung in giant, solemn cathedrals
And like chants flung across open fields
Surrounding great monasteries on ancient mountains.
It calls down from the hillsides in me,
Casts itself in surrender over my seas,
And rises and falls in symphonies through my valleys and vales,
And I chase it along the path that it travels.
It thrills me like eternity and echoes along its length--
It is pleasant and soft; it is hope,
And it fills me.

Angeles

I looked the city in the eyes.
I saw a squalor started there,
Undending through the ages, old as wind,
And ripping through the startled streets.
From where I stood upon the pinnacle,
I saw every set of eyes and
Every secret pain there living;
And I saw the angels like bright flashes,
Saw the angels gliding silently,
Saw the angels with upturned faces.
They were weeping, and so I wept.

I traveled through the streets to know them all,
And I felt in my insides a split of pain.
In each set of eyes that I knew,
I saw poverty and poetry and joy and good striving;
I saw the desperations involved in living;
I saw the languid infusions of light;
And in each was the gentlest reflection
Of the angels gliding gently over.
And each eye was weeping, and so I wept.

I met an angel, and her hair was dark and long.
She smiled at me with brimming eyes.
We did not speak, for our tongues knew separate worlds:
She spoke with the tongues of angels,
And I spoke with the tongues of men.
But our eyes shone together in a glimmering haste,
And we understood our eyes in the moments we had.
"Here," she said with her bright laughing eyes.
"No there," I said aloud, but she shook
Her head and touched my chest,
And I shook and split open.

From my belly, split, I saw all my heart,
In pieces tiny as the smallest seeds:
Saw them spill over the city
And thud solemnly to the earth,
Where they sprouted up like great trees.
I saw them spill over
The heads of the people,
Saw them land on the rooftops,
Saw them land in the great rivers
And swim downstream.

And then I saw them, caught up
In a great hushing rushing wind
And scatter across to the edges of the earth:
Saw them land in great laughs in tiny villages,
Whose starving people gathered them up like scraps of bread;
Saw them strike the oceans in great splashes
That made the cooling waves crack against the steaming shore.

And the angel spoke, and I understood her:
"Go," she said, "Collect each piece;
Find each shard; grasp each bit;
For here," she said, and touched my open chest,
"Is all life's mysterious good."

And we looked at each other,
Her bright eyes filling my eyes.
They were weeping, and so I wept.
They were laughing, and so I laughed.
She was dancing, and so I danced.

To A Potted Plant Outside My Window

A Sonnet
You bloom at mid-day, petals soft, exposed
To elemental changes in the sky:
A bird alights upon you, from you flies,
And then alights again. The noons expose
And beckon you to open in transposed
And brilliant symphony. The rain denies
You not your entrance to the grand reprise
Of day; it only grants you brief repose.

And to these all, oh flower of mid-day light,
You open in exotic scents of noon,
You open in your pleasure and delight;

But every evening close again, too soon
To see my transformation in the night:
To one who looks so very like the moon.

To My Potted Plant, in His Nakedness
I walked out onto the back porch this morning
and there you were just sitting there naked
and your flowers were strewn about you the flowers
I so admired just an afternoon before.

I was caught by surprise because I suspected
that your flowers would just keep blooming and
that they would take over the back yard until
I would not be able to see the world for you.

I glanced down at the flowers dead wilted
in the light of a new morning and wondered
in what universe would a flower
I saw the day before in lavender now be brown.

I wondered at your nakedness, your nakedness,
your utter lack of propriety you should cover up
your nakedness and take a lesson in decency because
I was just so surprised to find you sitting naked in your pottery.

I suggest to myself that the new purple flowers
mean new life or they mean the death of the old or they
mean a transition to something better but
I can't seem to see them for the dead ones littering my porch.


And Upon Your Fallen Petals
And upon your petals lies a look
Of utter shock that such a fate
Should befall you, you with your
Beauties unfolding in midday.
The shock is in their translucent
Shell, is in their clear brown
Muddy stream color, is in their
Sense of grief at being now unlovely.
You just bend against the wind
And wind yourself up toward
The midday sun that brought you
Life. Upon your new buds you
Shower your attentions,
And upon your petals, fallen,
You may once or twice raise
A pitying glance. But past
Is past, you say with a smile,
Purple and green glimmering
Up at the sun. Past is past.

On Disfigurement

The boy, eight, looks up with bright eyes shining,
Shining for his father's eyes,
Electrified by the same deep chasms of earth-toned eyes.
Mirrored and mirrored and on into eternity,
They stare, and they shine.

There is a hole where his cheek should be,
And his father's eyes, wet with intensity,
A deep fire burning in the bottomless chasm,
Run over and over the contour of flesh.
The boy grins: The lines of his lips fold up
To the left and end abruptly to the right.

He will have surgery, and then he will be beautiful.
That is what the doctors say.
He will have the surgery, and all his beauties--
The myriad subtleties of the shining eyes,
The line of his abrupt and constant smiles--
Will remain intact.

And his father tucks him in
Beneath a blanket with the letters of the alphabet.
The father points to the A (by his right cheek)
And down to the Z (down by his leftest toe)
And says, "I love you from here to here."

And says, "Are you scared?"
(The boy trembles underneath the blanket of letters
And the blanket of his father's hands spread across him.
The boy shakes his head, "No.")
And says, "It will be hard at times."
(The boy trembles, a shining tear cresting over
The great peak of his lid, caressing his contours).
And says, "We don't have to go through with it."
(The boy stops abruptly and smiles.
"Yes. We do.")

His father takes his child's face in his
Large, large hands,
And says, "I love you from here to here."
And he kisses his son on the left cheek,
Perfectly shaped and smiling just like all others,
And he kisses his son on the right cheek,
Where the contour glistens with a tear and is beautiful.

The Absurd

Could I tell you an equal merit is found
In something I find quite absurd:
A lady in giant, parade-like garb,
A child dressed up like a man--
A business suit, top-hat, and shoes?
And, simply by being absurd to me,
Is it made a universal absurdity?
Can no one find laughter in what I scorn?
Can no one feel pleasantness in the windstorm?:
One at which I scoff or mourn
And say, "Oh, what nasty weather,
What a waste of a day!"

There was a time when I was foolish,
Sitting up in a tree
Making branches into giraffe-necks.
You called me silly;
Does that make me
The universal absurdity?

June 2, 2008

I want to write a poem about you—
That sings the same way you sing,
Unabashed, sun hitting your dark eyes,
Singing with you in the same tune.
I want to scrawl upon the page of summer your name,
Or a word as strong and as suitable
For you; for you
Are those pleasant melodies
And those full words.
You are the sound of the sun
Making music with the likes of me.
You are the better parts about this mortal coil;
You are the loveliness lying in the soil;
You are the scars and healing balms;
You are all that chases away, like the sun,
The threat of coming storm.
I want to write a poem about you,
For you.

In Sickness, In Health

Now
Who am I
To howl, to
Grieve? Who
Can stand in
Such desert sands
And howl to silent
Golden expanses?
Now who am I, here,
Alone and howling?
Who am I to howl
In the quietness of crowds,
In the quietness of many?
I am a wilderness myself,
I say, I am a wilderness
And the winds that blow
Through me are the winds
That blow through many,
Many sands, and the age
Of my body is the age of
Many howling bodies in
The sands. Now who am I,
Here? Now who am I, I
The one with howling bones,
I the one with desert sand?
I, the one whose hands are
Full, cupped and full, of
Waste. I, the one whose
Many thoughts are only
Thoughts of dimming
Night. I, alone, am
A howl and a desert.
Now who am I, I
With my whimper?
Now where is my
Bread? Now, now
Where is my fish?
Where is a stone
To crush my head?
Where is a snake
To knip my heal?
Where, o Death,
Is your quieting,
Sweet silencing,
Sweet, quiet
Sting?

Unmatched

I was standing on the front porch
Looking, looking
Into the trees to catch a sight
Of lightning bugs before they blinked away.
And I thought how they looked like stars
When stars stream quickly through
The quickly-passing summer clouds
And blink for just a second, and then blink away
And you have to catch them with your eyes,
Unblinking, you must be fast
To see them.
So I stood there,
Wide-eyed to catch the blinking lightning bugs of summer there.
A wind blew, soft.

And then I, standing on my porch,
Looked up,
Gasped,
And, what a shock, I breathed out
As I caught a glimpse of ageless stars.
They did not peek from behind summer clouds;
They did not blink away when I blinked.
Each, cemented in the sky,
Streamed unfalteringly and always.
They did not blink at me,
And the lightning bugs did not distract, no not this time.
This time, this
Lovely time,
The stars stood out against their dark
The way they are meant to do.

And with what pleasure did I then
Remember that stupid metaphor I had in my head
(That lightning bugs resemble stars
And could be quite as beautiful);
I closed my eyes, still feeling those stars,
And sat down in my rocking chair
And fell peacefully asleep
In the quiet, still, good, kind face of the stars.