Poetry

It is cruel, this business of exile and divorce. I will not deny it.

Your hand on my nightgown, my soft places. I wish you wouldn’t do that.

Sound the flute! Now it’s mute! Bird’s delight, day and night.

God is there between things, sitting at his own left hand.

Lie down & whisper all your careless dreams into my votive ear.

Our cocoa is gone and our dreams are being eaten by mice.

There’s no need to check for a pulse, hold a hand mirror for breath.

The waves have heard of you. How you caress, how you kiss.

One spent the better part of this life writing in the dirt with a stick.

Such longings: Errant. Verdant. To have a good time. And dream.

Noelle, somewhere symphony number two listens to you breathing.

All roads lead to Rome, but all trails take you to Oklahoma.

Play hero, sunburned protagonist, awake in our dream.

Fumbling among the constellations, I believed my throat would burst.

I feel as if I have been struck from the book of the living.

I think there was a center about which I never even thought to ask.

My childhood is a city where tenderness was frowned upon.

That year, the mail would arrive as white as warning, as flashing teeth.

Splayed toes adhesive on a whitewashed wall, ghost-tattoo.

Imagine being able to calm the one you love best, who loves you best.

It’s the human genius of reproducing not quite exactly.

I’d leave the house at night and walk the road, knowing I was watched.

It has its life, returning always to the ocean. It doesn’t care.

Any good river should be fat, any good ocean should be worth meeting. A child won a hundred dollars by taking it from the tail of a muddy calf. I remember Robinhood too, but that feels like a different thing.

What I want is a woman who knows all the meanings of indulgence.

A clumsy coyote descends an old hill of garbage. Death is visiting.

I loved the game not for its shapes alone, but for symmetry’s quiet flash.

I was a son again until my parents died. Even then, I felt like myself.

I must be led by what was given to me as streams are led by it

Perhaps the only way to see a whole body is to see one coming out of you.