-- Your ear, a window pane, Through which sound enters, Filtered light enters.

I hold that bell and shake it. Then my mouth kisses The following echo.

You quiver, a sliver ring Holds it. A forest borders it. I begin to lose myself in the forest.

--

Your hair is my forest. A green ribbon holds it, A net dripping with black rain.

I loosen the ribbon and burrow My nose, seeking an aroma Of bread, to break and eat.

You swell. Swells of hair Reach me. And I go shouting, Deeper and deeper into the night.

--

Your nape, a bridge of bone Arching between a continent And an island, both you.

My fingers pace restlessly its span. A sea stirs overhead. I lick The foam flecked air.

You shiver, a wind escapes From your throat carrying A chant. I stop and listen.

--

Your throat, a convexity, A cave full of music And weeping.

I drink from that bowl. Water first, then heat of your Skin and drum beats.

You murmur, a string Vibrates. My mouth walks Into the violin.

--

Your jaw, a mountain of glass, of glaciers, of soft meadows.

I begin climbing from one end, So slowly that it will be morning When I reach the other end.

You stir, ice moves under me, Flowers open their eyes, Sun rises from the other side!

--

Your mouth, an oyster, A chest of stalactites, The secret of a hidden river.

With what can I open This? My lips are but Crude and blunt knives.

You cut yours over them. Words stop. We become A silence.

-- 2004:01:19 12:00 Atlanta

My Poems

I remembered that spring day, Merry Widow was on the radio, rubber pressing into the curves of Mason Mill and my hours which were cleaved into silly merriment and still contenment, by your presence.

Today as I drove by that rusted fence, with bronzed beeches beyond, the radio turned off, rain singing on the sun roof. It occured to me, how Time is now more simply divided into sleeping and
this waking into your absence.

Do fall leaves as they fall change the spin of the earth, just so?

But with words, I had spun the north arrow, spun myself into a series of mazes. Where lies the answer, if not there?

A saying comes to me, "When God gives, He slaps, yes slaps it on so thick, that His shoes are torn to shreds". Only He seems to be quite miserly with truth.

My frayed words must have arrived at your light house, perhaps wearing epaulets of an U Boat navy. Were you brave in confronting them?

My body, thus after the stripping, is bare, ready, waiting in the chamber, for the interrogator. A solitary desire is still flickering, in fear, in resignation, like an almost dead fluorescent street lamp.

Perhaps at a certain point it will sputter out. Or perhaps a child will shoot a hole through it, with a BB gun.

The past then will take its proper place. An old restaurant bill fished out of a wallet, a slip of paper with a poem written in your childish hand, a face stuck in a group photograph that becomes harder and harder to identify when sight goes first, followed on its heels by memory.

Then night will come. It will come, with that forgetting we call sleep, towards the end of every line.

My Poems