1 New Poem

Paper Skins

The pallid sting in off-yellow afternoons,
we turn once over as sandstone rummage

to make quiet bearable
(but I like the silence with dressed

blue you, and the bedknob artifacts
of wind chime naturalism; could have

stood in it longer than that since left
stutter I wish I’d lose like twenty

pounds of unneeded packing), to make
our writing on each other’s sky-like

vestments a slashing, ancient kind,
burning stalk field alight with

brittle confession, alight with
pausing persistence of hostel fridge

beer bottles, with frazzling
hand gestures when words are over with.

Papyrus script hand, click-tapping
a heel-shoe rhythm with rise-fall

of knotted chest muscle, accidents
of close quarters where you draw

an olden symbol upon our days
without meaning to, and crossing

wires in haphazard design.

1 New Poem

Tides & You

This crashing stretches out,
infinite in crest and ever-looming
shape, the same as water salt,
mixed solution.

You never loved us like you did
the sunshine, the humid air,
the longing liberation from too clean
streets and last year’s fashions.

But it isn’t some crafted secret,
something you have to work
with plastic line-make triangle,
with bureaucratic nooses and parchment paper.

How much more could it be,
else written between the space
of Renaissance star charts and
space age thinking of the year?

But, then, the obviousness of cross waves

becomes an often mystery at these
elevations, the winding down of roadways
procession-like in exact time.

1 New Poem

Books in Bed

It was well enough for me,
this silence in summer-mocking air,
this calm of constant refrain from
the bedside bookstand to the motioned
figures beneath sheets, living like
we’d gotten on in years past the
fitful flirtations of collegiate clumsiness,
past the blues of honeymoon contemplation
to that open water of cool-eyed passions,
still embers that heat rooms when the
windows are open.

It was so close for once,
that shade of sun you kept imprinted
in skin, that sinew of toughened mystique
you had in glittering presence, and
all those figures you had in shapely
dresswork.

But aren’t you still that bad girl’s
blandishments, that one all those Llosa
novels, all that cheap whiskey talk,
all the tired grandee strutting
had warned against?

Oh, in stillness, how wrong it was
to believe,

though it was enough for me,
if not for you.

1 New Poem

Stay Awhile

Someday I’ll smile upon this smoothing
of Sol bottle labels with thumb
under jazz band din, circular fluctuation
of brass man’s hands flick-fluttering
against a winnowing of Christmas light
shock, against the drawing-up of plentitude
maps we write as youth’s cartographers,
our muse of darkening light-fingered
persuasion,

yes, some day, but without the
flesh-coloured mortification of dancing
about these old-time words for a
great motion of meaning, stirring
renditions of pastime prizes and
the things that never seem as they
do in greeting cards, in Halloween films.

You stay, though, the breathing of
heavy traffic but a bitter memorial
of honesty’s forbearance and the
swung tempo of attempted lover’s
hands; you stay, though why
can be but yours to answer.

So, stay. Here. Just a little while.

Just until the greyer dawn of
years, just until forever stops.