1 New Poem

Song for Those Gone

I’ve heard it said
some things lost are never to be found,
but all things must return:

new forms and shades,
new shapes and names.

In dreams, you flutter on air,
butterfly wings too soon silenced,
taken under tow of time and weight,
too beautiful to be born.

We imagined you
speaking in schoolyard codes,
pitter-patter of nervous foot on floor,
tasting the first berries of summer.

But, maybe, you’ll come
as a rainbow
a sunbeam
a songbird
a shading tree.

Something that holds only joys
for you held nothing dark of
the world, nothing to spoil
from becoming all you could.

But you were all you could be:

Ours,
loved,
all seconds we shared.

1 New Poem

 Blankets (Stardust)

When you were born,
shivering,
you already held,
everyone you could have
given to the world,

the same as your mother,
and hers before;
all hoops joined in chain,

I see when I watch
the women with exhausted,
purple eyes, falling asleep
on their husbands’ shoulders,

under the digital readouts on
healthy eating in the first trimester,
billing costs for reserve scans.

The same as when
I hold you,
glacial,
I hold all the ghosts
of troubled teenage nights,

that wash away,
against light of
next thousand lifetimes,
we hold together.

1 New Poem

 Moon Cycles

Often, in silent times, I think
of trees and death, and how
they are the same:

Circular, replenished, endless,
taking, growing in kind,

Set between plastic places
that echo art that tastes
of bitter ash, bootleg cigarettes,

Back to the spring from which
all things flow.

I think, “why the Garden,
why plants, rocks, sunlight, rain,
why things so small hold joys?”

They are circles,
reminders of home.

1 New Poem

Embers

I was a great collaborator with

wartime cigarettes, an artist

with the conical scream-sighs

of life under bombardment.

I trust you more under

a broken street lamp, under

a shattered sky space,

where time stills

Than I ever did at dinner

tables pushed together on

sidewalks where some grand

conspiracy was hatched beneath

Breath you took in so

easily, not as now with

cracked plaster, mulched brick,

petroleum haze.

1 New Poem

A Note for Fathers

You dwell in memory:
blazing, soot-smoke, refined flame,
shifting, yet stone-hard,
with weights unbound.

There are scarce words
I would have written,
amongst polish concrete monuments,
amongst pine-willow shade,

had I the blood that now courses,
breath that now fills,
webs of infinite electric complexity
that pour themselves onto paper,

now.

Then I was bereft of all,

shivering for the slight,
tender touch of idle hands,
offering frozen comfort,
knowing some other truth.

In the chisel marks,
you persist
doing now no damage,
knowing now no strife,

knowing not how
grass, water, time,
can move boulders –

do not dull wounds.

1 New Poem

 A Long-Ago Castle

There was a vanished treaty
between us, an unfinished thing
in pieces of air,
in words of departure.

A promise across waters,
in amber remembered,
that I held bright, praying
for broken bells to ring.

Your signature, after I took
the hill, bloody and wracked,
dripped from lips with
wounded tone, but I

took it sincere, in a lampshade
way beneath the din of
the Turkish restaurant ,
beneath the pale light of
London black cabs.

Mine, as I stare now into
infinite regress of couch fabric
patterns,  brutalist math
of spreadsheets, time punch cards,

Was holding something back
some patterned longing
with no words to name:

This would only be memories,
written on the parchment of
windbreaks and stream lines.

1 New Poem

A Time in Spring

I heard the Cranberries in the back

of the Yogyakarta taxi:

Transmissions from other times,

lingering like window lights

on the dusty street,

warm glow of iftar dinners,

That rushed past as we

sang into the humid night,

Irish troubles bleeding

into a symphony of

Motorcycle signals,

street vendor shouts,

Warung announcers pushing

unfiltered cigarettes, on passing

Tourist crowds.