New Seasons

It is here,
the dear memory of spring
revived like Lazurus.
And life must summon
hope from the heat,
from the rain's reminder:
Keep breathing.

On summer nights,
of stifled thunder,
the air ignites with meteors,
with expectation.  You sleep.
You dream on balconies
naked, wrapped
in powdered sheets
that tug at your desire.

The sun comes--
curious enough--
to caress all of you,
the linen of your skin,
not yet torn
not yet opened.

But you remember
all of this, at least
a version
that turns on the loss
that costs you
everything
come Fall.

As summers go
in radiant succession
and elm and oak
and aspen grow
tired of their modesty,
an honest shrug
is all it takes
to denude
your father's stand.

Now,
shorn of color,
humbled by the snow
and barely breathing,
there are whispers.
All your secrets lay
beneath the poverty
of Winter.

Lazarus

The injury of sex--
this wound, this scar--
heals like sweat
evaporating.

Recalled,
my cooling body
begins to breathe.

I am Lazarus
wrapped in linen,
fever broken, walking;
I am
roused from the grave.

You wanted
(so badly) to see me again,
to fuck (I presume)
but now
you keep your distance. 
Standing
pressed in the corner,
you say I smell
of decay. 

To assuage you,
I sleep
outside
like a dog
without the moon
to summon
my howl.

Shiver Me Timbers

The old rugged cross and its long, long shadow casts doubt on the decisions she has made.  The child was a foundling, an orphan; she had not aborted him.  And yet--not knowing his fate--she still feelsthe stabbing guilt of having given him up.  The act, and the exaggerated memory of the act, percolates through her dreams.  She hopes the child is safe, loved.  And he stays with her.  Waking from fitful sleep, she pictures the boy--now eight years old--all smiles.  She imagines his happiness will sate her curiosity, her belief in his happiness.  But the doubt stays with her.  In her mind's eye, he remains a smudge, a blur, and the houses she pictures him in do not manage to define him.  Tonight, projected on her clenched and prayerful eyelids, he is playing in front of a house that is hosting an invincible summer.  The lawn is green precision.  The flowers crowd the various  polygons of rich, red earth.  This is his home, the house she provided for him by her sacrifice.  Designing these make-believe habitats for her disappeared son, she gathers to herself a (false) sense of control.  This is a practical excercise.  She is astonished by the lack of sentiment.  The dream house evaporates--presumably carried away in pieces---and, in the darkness, she imagines solutions to problems that her perfectionism has invented.  We join them all for a beer on the porch.  But the enigmatic boy is not there.  Cold.  Tired.  Afraid.  He goes down the stairs to sleep on the rug in front of the fire.  She is left with the houses (and her own guilt and loss) and to keep from going mad, there in the wee hours, she closes her eyes and remembers the rooms, explores their size and decoration.  She traces the dimension walking the floor plan.   And the idea of the house is a gift to be given away.  The missing child is suggested again and again.  There is no one to defend him. 

gangLia

My nerves at night
were trained on others,
the straining of telepathy.
The silence of their thoughts
oppressed me; like monsters
their villainy was constructed
from common objects,
faintly outlined,
in a darkened room.

The day comes like a siren,
in hot pursuit.  She is made of helium,
her voice as high as angels,
rising, diminishing.
She is about to disappear.
My nerves bristle; the skin
(once thin) is made of needles.
Excite me and the balloon of you
POPS!
Whats left?  A broken condom,
a puddle of nerves.

My nerves have been highways,
and railways, and random
jangled, jack-knife paths.
They have pursued phantoms in blue
forests filled with the nocturnal.
There is the danger I have
mistaken for life and the life
I have taken--stupidly--for granted.

And now as the ganglia
retreat--stung and humbled--
they wither
like a parasitic vine
wrapped around the host
(which it has killed).  And still
the net of neurons comforts me
a quilt against the shade.

The patchwork pieces--
the batting, the lining, the skin--
are held together in constellations,
tiny pins pushing through
some cosmic acupuncture.

Night falls
again.  The ganglia ignite.
This bed becomes
a lake of fire; the sky is crowded.
There are one hundred thousand eyes--
our gods, our tricks, our ancestors--
unblinking,
rapt as taxidermy,
looking down.

March Forth

Greta Garbo.  Greta Garbo, the syllables are a bit slippery, breathlessly so.  She exhales--communicating with smoke signals in billowing cursive ink.  She has the courage of one elegantly applied gesture:  "Greta Garbo" spoken in a whisper as she pushes her middle finger over my lips.  Unclear is if she has just seen Ms. Garbo and is has been startled by the specter or if she suddenly thought of the answer to Final Jeopardy or the morning crosswords....

or perhaps she has sunken into pure delusion:  "I am Greta Garbo." she says and her pull on me is like the riptide, the agressive flirtations of the lunatic moon.  Her finger with its chipped glittered polish has branded me, commanded me.  Clear is me now, suddenly and out of obligation, locked in  my head.  I am stuck inside my bed in my suite in my hotel.  I mouth the words, "I am Greta Garbo.  And I want to be alone."

This is the thistle of relationship--the stickiness and the nettles;  the two fold strategy of luring first with the sweet milk of the stem and then burying into fur or fabric with tender hooks to be taken to far horizons.  There is the intoxication, drunk on sugar and sustenance, the hummingbird begins to weave and warble...there is the waste (of love).  And when the memories have made an itchy place under the saddle, this stallion will rise and buck and run, until the seeds of that despair have found a new country.

Loss

When the world ends,
I will miss the face you made
every time you came.