Its so hard to remember in the world – –   Weren’t you there?        Dead so you
think of ports – – Couldn’t reach flesh – –       Might have to reach flesh from
anybody – – 

my ice skates on a wall
lustre of stumps washes his lavender horizon
he’s got a handsome face of a lousy kid
rooming-houses dirty fingers
whistled in the shadow
“Wait for me at the detour.”

After years of secret glances,
I knew it well – a cage of slanted
wires arranged on a Doric column
in my grandparents’ living room.

Spring cleaning in Baltimore always involved
a yellow bucket sloshing with soapy water
and a rag recognized as the tattered remains
of my father’s bowling shirt, circa 1973.

Receding hairline, your rented room
in the wooded hills beyond light
pollution and suburbia, your penchant
for slender women with large eyes
and small breasts, talent for language

Talk and you wonder if that could be a voice.
And you lie lightly, skimming the cream
of sleep off the top of an endless night. 

He said, “We do not love by word alone,”
And pulled the silence down around his voice
As though a sound could hurt him. Since those words
Became their own perverse, inviting promise,
She had to smile: “Then what is left to say
That you will listen to, except a kiss?”

You’re nothing but a bad pomme,
grainy fruit (not pome), a globose
berry from which we’ve garnered
garnets, grange, gram, and grenadine.

Your task is to gamble on limited
light and space and face the
meadow, alkali mallow, let light
lick your basal rosette and bloom
bottle thistle through your bearded
creeper.

Of people: These
are all soft animals.
Not one is made of steel.
That
is what he thought.
He felt that they would feel.
If not next day, next Monday.
And he smiled.

The Wise Men will unlearn your name.
Above your head no star will flame.
One weary sound will be the same–
the hoarse roar of the gale.
The shadows fall from your tired eyes
as your lone bedside candle dies,
for here the calendar breeds nights
till stores of candles fail.