My hands have not touched pleasure since your hands, -- No, -- nor my lips freed laughter since 'farewell', And with the day, distance again expands Voiceless between us, as an uncoiled shell.

Yet, love endures, though starving and alone. A dove's wings clung about my heart each night With surging gentleness, and the blue stone Set in the tryst-ring has but worn more bright.

I was reading Hart Crane today at Borders even though at the end it was too painful to read the next word in each line. He is a poet I had never read and I think who should be read. Consider these lines and go onto voyages into Crane's poetry and life:

And so, admitted through black swollen gates That must arrest all distance otherwise Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments, Light wrestling there incessantly with light, Star kissing star through wave on wave onto Your body rocking! and where death, if shed; Presumes no carnage, but this single change -- Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn The silken skilled transmemberment of song; Permit me voyage, love, into your hands .

[1] Into this dark space after I send out pain a single bubble at a time, I measure it's depth again. I have a lot of more opaque water, turgid like soap, to work through, see it's not easy to overturn the bowl, to spill the bleak waters and become an clean space, see it takes time sometimes a few days and sometimes a whole life.

[2] A couple adopted a stray dog,which she took home. I have been adopted too, a stray loner by a love I can't name or measure. It drips through the hourglass's neck, fine sand dribbling through and into my cracks, steadily filling. On it, I am being slowly risen again into the horizon as the foam of waves, which are wiping away traces of names, which are wiping away the castles of pain.

[3] I am standing in the sky leaning and measuring the fall, a single stray thought that says: jump. They say that high places almost make one to let go, the height makes one to take mindless leaps. Her soulful eyes that were about to leave were one such height. Those words were the gusting wind: how I felt about her? She asked them. And I held my breath and took two steps away from any free falling. I was not certain of what my body would hit

Each a movement away, into something new: shedding pain, diving into love and surfacing on her shore.

2002:12:30 01:00 Atlanta (AD)

For C.T, T.F.C, R.J and S.B

Usally a poem is "for"ed for a single person, but since all the four people mentioned were pivotal in it's writing, it's for all four.

Forgetfulness is like a song That, freed from beat and measure, wanders. Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled, Outspread and motionless, -- A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night, Or an old house in a forest, -- or a child. Forgetfulness is white, -- white as a blasted tree, And it may stun the sybil into prophecy, Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.