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.

It’s a vocabulary of old country
songs, unfaithful women
and open roads, a scratchy
vinyl itching in her thighs.
This fear of swimming pools
and gas station bathrooms. 

This tiny thing breathing between us that aches something awful.
By summer, I am slipping all the complimentary mints in my coat pockets
while you pay the check. Gripping the railings on bridges to keep
diving over. Some dark dog in my throat when I say hello.

For years, I dreamt of the child who, when I reached out to her,
turned into a sheet of paper, and so, in waking hours, I wrote and
wrote and wrote and my friends consoled me: see, you have book
babies; this, while I looked on at other women who knit bibs and
booties, so many booties, such small socks. 

Caught in the belly of a whale within a turgid sea and among me the sorry remains of little fish. There is no color of blood. (You see, the island will be full of strange foreboding.)

The west was a patchwork of color flung over a racing sky,
The wind was a lover’s whisper that needed no reply,
The strip was of weed-torn concrete, scarring the desert floor,
And a derelict came flying,
Flying, flying,
A derelict came flying,
Long final to zero four.

I hear you walking in the night;
You think I’m fast asleep.
I know your sounds of loneliness;
I hear you pray and weep.

The
sea urchin
is a repository
for the souls
of mariners
reaped by the sea

All night the room breathes out its grief.
Exhales through surfaces. The sideboard.
The curtains: the stale air stalled there.
The kiln-fired claws of the china bird.

In the deep fall, the body awakes,
And we find lions on the sea-shore–
Nothing to fear.
The wind rises, the water is born,
Spreading white tomb clothes on a rocky shore,
Drawing us up
From the bed of the land.