All night in a box of light geometric cradle of office buildings windows still lit— why? they obscure the sky replace the stars above quiet streets full rivers of pavement at mostly right angles— you are the only company I keep in these hours and your hunger, and your cry— I expand to fill each need the broken boundaries of sleep the velvet darkness of this room this makeshift nursery I watch you for as […]
It has been a while and it will be a while more still awake waiting to watch an hour disappear shouldn’t be it’s late and getting later or earlier wherever you draw the line however you define it looking through your photos to know a thing to have to hold it it must be late to be thinking still about distance
Does an emptiness attract more space or manufacture it one or the other such a nice day after all, cold, clear elevator affability and sunlight drawing in everything except those cherished words not anymore through unthinking neglect or something more willful one or the other and would it even matter it may snow tomorrow a line is drawn never benign no, this much but not a breath more a love gone asymptotic
This morning, walking, a welder’s sparks falling inside a building frame, a cage of flames and empty space, of noncommittal sky. Sactum sanctorum, with its quietest corners, a heart, too, is made from many rooms: antechambers, foreparlours, endlessly recessing, a heart has no heart to it, it is a door that opens and shuts. Passage defines it, existence demands it, a place of access, and egress, that hue of regret. Somewhere along this way, honeysuckle […]
Twelve grapes at midnight washed down with champagne one for love and one for hatred one for kindness and one for relentlessness one for luck and one for persistence one for hope and one for remembrances one for going and one for staying and in all its sweetness and for all its bitterness another two for love
The dawn keeps on dawning. What was it that I thought I saw? Quickly forget the taste of lime and salt, warmth that lingers like an honest embrace. Cold rain. The gingko piebald, a tree at half-mast. What is love and what is loveable? The vacant building has a gray façade. A gray car passes in the slick gray street, the fallen leaves too damp to lift. A heavy act, to turn away, withholding. Mark […]
Lost in some forest north of the city, the driver returns the wedding guests home, some somewhat drunk, a song rises up, hoarse, flamenco– staccato clapping, the rutted road, headlights bathing the night fog in gold. There is no place to be now, the wedding guests are returning home, with newly-softened gazes, reminded again of love, the road turning in on itself, laughter, fake despair. The wedding over, the driver drives the wedding guests somewhere, […]
And like that, overnight, the end of full summer— a tainted glass, rain, that striking first chill. Oh there is something so sad and lovely about these first days of autumn: A distance carries more, an absence weighs, a heart grows blonder, gold as desire, as early larches turning to fire, as bold gestures dreamed of in quiet hours, the night gone still. The night that follows the day, the beauty and terror of the […]
Woke late to frank sun dry hills teeming with passerines and one hoarse quail panting out its love. How foreign, to let it go unspoken, not to sing out from break of dawn as if your very heart were bursting— In the shade a dove’s cool notes, cicadas starting up, even the breeze in the sagebrush discontented until it too is heard
All these words are easy to write: In the grove, purple orchids delve into air, at night, the squat palm by the door is a fistful of feathers. But you, mi amor— Bird calls bubbling, water around a drain, even inland from Hanelei the world is water, breezes like rain among fat rubber leaves. I sit and watch stray cats prowl beneath the lanai like soft gray afterthoughts, impervious to my calls. All day, big waves, heard even from the taro fields. Some things remain comfortably beyond me.
OPTIONAL POETRY 