I see them aloft-
your dreams,
high above your head-
something in pastels
shaded with deep red
and bold charcoal lines.
And the way
you look at these-
upward
with widened eyes-
draws me into your bliss,
warm and nestled
sitting in the corners
of your smile.
Yesterday, I cut back the burning bush
on the hill beside my house.
It never spoke to me.
Not once.
It had grown higher
than I stand, unchecked
for now thirteen years,
and never commanded me
to remove my shoes.
It is recommended
that the wings be trimmed in late winter,
before new growth begins.
The fly-away branches-gone now. Just
fragments discarded on some sad morning
and a rooted scrag in place
awaiting rebirth.
I see no divine providence
or transcription of holiness
in this. Hope will follow
in the spring.
Now, a deepening chill ebbs
-in vain.
Winter is not yet over,
and I tarry in the garden
alone.
It seems like a metamorphosis
of sorts.
There is evolution of the language
in the shade of pines,
assuaged by a sun companion,
the complexities of the song
from her secret heart-
a pastorale,
that lures and covers me.
I become sacrificial
and my tongue,
a voice in the chorus,
melds with the music.
A heightened song
of concurrence-
wrapped in vines of honeysuckle,
floating in basins of still water.
Ringing true, long after
the last word is uttered
in near, deep silence.
This place I recall,
where I stacked chairs
against the wall, placed in rows
like a caravan,
readied as a train to resign.
Something empty,
forgotten in a room
with silver clouds and wooden tomes
describing Vesuvius and its ashes
falling.
That which buries me
only spalls, and I – willing for lightning
to strike –
don’t forget that
beneath the cumulonimbus,
one part rains,
another part shades.
In the green, a want
is growing – still and hopeful-
rapt. And knowing that the spell
is brief,
a pin-point moment -lust-
a thief glances – no-
it clutches
hold and deepens,
dilates what was touched
and seasoned.
Lines and edges, flecks and flux
core and flesh, entwined amok.
And somehow, moments in the end
a cured and coupled image
penned, a brush too lightly
to offend,
and focused there,
she starts again.
She is demure , with longing eyes
that watch scenes pass into relief.
Past-written and clothed in the moment
just before an outburst,
not a full-fledged flower,
but a blossom,
in paced steps-
dear to watch over
hands to hold-
leaned into,
fixed in secret,
there opened
and told.
The public order
of the ocean,
a blur of mist and foam.
The captive sounds
of marching throngs
so felt this far
from home.
A crushing flood
of tides and breakers,
twelve bars into song
assuage the mystic
caravan singing,
everybody
let’s get stoned.
Shrieking, cry the gulls
above the din
of skin and groans.
I toss a shell.
It’s gonna rain.
I feel it
in my bones.
it begins as a wisp
neither taut nor explicit
a scribbled idea
on a plain yellow post-it,
sitting for weeks
til the stickiness faded
then moved ’round the table
it’s purpose degraded
and ultimately lands
in pile, curled – misled
like so many of my thoughts
of desire go unread.
The petals, her soliloquy,
quivering with imbued poise
and rapt, the mind’s quick fancy
to capture her employs.
Among the quichens grows a kree
a site-astoric flustsymbly.
A kree is there, not roneously,
but freet and gorl and groverly.
And how it came to grow just there,
the primmets wonder with atious care,
For quichens do not keep or share
their time or place or own elsewhere.
The primmets garnered brave and asked
the kree just how it came to pass
that it was given reign to mass
and live with quichens, in their class.
The kree looked puzzled, audly moussed
the primmetts had not gaged – deduced
the kree was here for years to roost
and shared it with the quichens fruste.
Taps and Ratamacues 