Words

Whalesong II

Tucked in between the breeze and the trees

there is a curtain-flash of who you are now.

Few months of silence haven’t covered my

eyes to this particular ghost, memories sing

from the rustling of the leaves, molten flesh

of yours can’t fight the crisp air of grief now.

This song of yours, carried on a raven’s back,

and holding up its wings, arrives here in waves.

A somber, gnarled tone in the whistling of the wind.

From my spine, antenna-like, comes a low, metallic scraping,

ribs grinding together as they move to another life’s arrangement.

There is space for you here. Rest your head against the falling air

of my breath, we can stay still, rising and falling, again.

These two melodies are not going to hear each other. 

The gust passes from the leaves. Chasing after it

a song of my own, if it catches the wind right

it might make its way to you. If you look up,

you might find me shaking the leaves loose.

If you look down, they might fall into forms

still not forgotten, petals arranged like rigid

fingers of mine unknotting your tensed back.

Ripples

And later, when I am dead or living again,

they will find me picking out your splintered bones

from my threadbare soles, walking 

by that park where I should have known

we were never going to outrun it. 

Sitting by the water, two empty, wooden chairs we never sat in, 

together, still, watching the river at night. 

The warmest parts of you I remember 

leave me through my nose, turning to brief, opaque fog.

Later, someone will find you hiding behind my eyes.

I am distant in conversations,

I am cursed to be a brief, opaque fog, 

fading into the night air

as someone I love walks away. 

Collections

I’m not religious anymore,

but a crumbling cathedral of a man

cut through my daily impiety this morning.

Hunched under the ornate arches of a church

with a paper cup for coins, he sat bracketed by stone

and stained glass. Across his face, ochre and purple,

the stitched pieces told a story, this cheek from another life

that eyebrow from a youthful face like mine. I stared at him for a moment, reverently. 

His eyes turned towards me, clouded and glassy, and in them, in their gnarled memories

I saw home, I saw my grandfather, I saw my 

decrepit old folks in churches praying to god

the last father they had. I saw children that don’t call home and I saw

parents sitting by the phone and wondering god

do they remember when I rocked them to sleep?

In his eyes a single drop welled up and dialed home and said I try to remember, I do.

The ripped cloth faces in his jacket keep him company, soft gargoyles rocked by the breeze.

I wandered into the church, and inside were those colors,

ochre, purple, gold and mahogany, and a stone quiet

so stark it turned my breath cold. Outside, the man,

and inside, a locked donation box, gunmetal.

It is a faith of some kind, that the six dollars

I left inside would go to restoring

the crumbling cathedral-man.

Whalesong

Garbage trucks groaning;

the deep whalesong of diesel 

drowns my alarm, cut-

ting through my street; a 

placid and jutting cove of 

night-sea. It’s early.

Someone lies beside

me, I don’t know what to call

her yet. She goes by

laughter and moonlight.

Even as we rest, silent,

in the air there is

a sweeping current,

an inexorable pull

of us towards each-

other. We fall and

fall again surprised into 

second-long glances.

Outside, hydraulics 

screech, lifting bins in the air.

The truck behind stirs,

there is love in the 

rolling engine melody; 

a fire turning and 

turning again. We

trade murmurs like whalesong through

the crashing wave noise.

Interstate Slow-Burn

Today we don’t mind the traffic. We look together,

the sun low over the snaking interchange,

schools of brake lights like soft ripples 

on a sullen, moon-scaled river. We crawl with

the windows down, in silent, accustom awe

at the semi-trucks looming alongside.

Between us, the silence of the second summer back home,

the haze from the first familiar licks of lighter-flame.

The smoke bends and warps unwillingly as I ease 

off the brake. If we could stand the mosquitoes,

we’d wait in the breakdown lane

for the sun to drown in steel and concrete,

and sit on the trunk, watching the still-water

asphalt spirit strangers through the night.

While the sun is out,

(your distant, skyward cousin)

I see you as you are,

wispy, wavering, hungry and transparent.

Your friends are around, your rocks, your dirt,

they keep you safe, and you keep them warm.

You sizzle and steam, you grow and you wean,

And no one pays you much mind, for the sun is out. 

While the sun is setting,

(your envied, storied sister)

I see you saturate your skin.

Your limbs brighten and solidify as you stretch for the smoke.

The smoke turns orange in the tree tops,

painted by the sunset, and revered by the air. 

They say the sky is on fire, in phophoresent attire,

And no one pays you much mind, for the sun is setting. 

But when the sun is set,

and the guests have left,

I see you as you are to me,

full and opaque, defined against the dark, twisting and dancing. 

When you've sunken into somber embers

I’ll crouch by your heart, and breathe life into you,

you’ll roar back to health, writhe and untie yourslelf,

and we’ll sing and singe each other to sleep. 

The trees have begun singing their saccharine songs to lovers,

and the sky has cast away the clouds from over their heads.

I should like to think that a day like this,

a day drawn with broad strokes cast by the long tar-tinted shadows of early evening,

one day would paint me in a nicer light,

the way the sun through blinds partitions a page of a book whose name I forget.

The day, like the sun, like the moon, like the sky, like the trees,

invites talk opened by warm eyes and closed by a gentle floating downstream.

A bee lands on my table, I tense up. But the bee is beautiful,

it combs pollen from its head and torso, it too has discussed,

albeit with the flowers. I wonder if they are friends,

if they have history, the flower and the bee, as I erase the page again.

I am laughing in the shower. I am laughing in the shower and I wish I could cry.

I am laughing at myself, maybe. It seems like

such a waste to love the scraping of the pollen off my bones.

It seems like such a waste, to offer myself completely,

and get pollen in return, casing the outside of my windpipe,

tightening my neck. I am confused and choking and I am laughing.

Today the sky is filled, with clouds and bees,

and flowers and friends mill about in the grass.

The bee is turning on the table now, looking for more,

and I hope it will fly until one day,

it falls out of the sky, beating its wings which have been worn to nubs,

by the wind, and the sky, and the air, the pollen and more.

And if by chance it lands near a flower

perhaps the flower will bend down, and care,

and talk about love to the bee,

and coat the bee one more time.

When it’s limbs can’t bring themselves to scrape it off

as the bee lays there, after all, how much of a waste it must seem,

the bee might learn to live with it,

and I might stop laughing as I scrape soap into my skin.