3 New Poems

Arc Light

Bending blue in afternoons,
sea docks’ wooden lap-laugh
at metal hulls on shoreline tangles,
signs of heartbeat across our
close-miking conversations, when
I go out and figure things
in ruler-slide breaths of face
in cave side etchings of pounded
doorframes, the friends we make
smiling and forgotten with
shatter-gust of soft summer rain.

It’s there you find an ice-hollowed
echo of timeless features, a drastic
chisel of motions made whole in
unseen fissures, skipping frames,
dulling-fade mind’s eye picture
dipped in rust water, like starring
out station wagon windows at 13
in a stardust crusade that made
us feel together, under a same day’s
premonition we could have felt
in rock candy dress fabrics,

if only we’d listened harder
to splashes of rain water against
beach rock, and nothing much else
to hear.

Table Manners

Silverware was set for you,
bleached cloths, spotless crystal,

all appointed with aristocrat’s
wrist-flick splendor, living waxwork;

so you did, with your locks of
bushy-bundled hair, take to a certain sort

the type that never came with knife pairings,
but a sort of eye trick illusion, disguising.

On Paintings of Surrender

When we clash, running to human
points of fleeting touch to steel
as flesh kept under cabinet key,
we light up olden day skies, a thunder-crack
of lost teenage fumbling, with hints
of soft speech we gather from books,
continental conversations.

It isn’t so much to bend a knee

I came, but to draw pencil leads,
sketch some places that couldn’t have
been so gray if only we’d had
greater courage of shutting up when
slipping points called for it,
when we weren’t so proud of ourselves
for quoting columns out of context
and being too clever by half to fall.

But I still don’t wave trillium
bouquets aloft for a certain sight
of you coming back in daydream air,
only for crooked view of
such, more tampered with by salty
washing, nights of ice glass and
spirits sentimental.