105
coral street No puedo tener mi amante
but I can
have this
sunset porch with candles lit
with music lit
a gel of orange
warm fire
against my watered down
bewilderment
my cat and I pretend
to live in Spain
and listen to the outdoor
speakers
cast Latino waves
into the double-dyed and
moonlit air it
drips
like new batik
across a slope of lawn wet
through, as
trains
in bellybands
trundle on to border towns
and flatten copper pennies
for
your thoughts, or for
mine, in each of their
untangled finished
and
unfinished ends.
31 feb 02
blndrmar02
|
sea
level His spirit beckons
different than the rest.
It
pulls like the white light
of an August moon.
I
am a coral meadow
bulging from the ocean floor,
cool seawater drenched
in a sting of brine, a cove whose sand is
coarse
and simple.
He siphons cold dark
winters from my deepest
waters, he
bathes me
in the incense
of his skin. My flora opens
like oleander
blossoms after rain to the
colors of his fire sky.
11
jul 02 |
------------------------------------------------------------------ small
boats on travis
Near the cabin door the Riesling
is spent,
its dark bottle rolls across a soggy floor
and knocks. It rolls
and knocks, tapping like a woman with a cane.
Fishing boats
huddle below the disappearing sun, they hush
like bees settled
in their hives. Moon after moon, I watched the bright
white
sails. Circling, gliding,
dancers in a rink. I waited, a waterbird with
silent wings. Fools, what headless
fools we were. We could have
had these
nights, been these nights, these groggy kisses laced with
wine.
This night. Our night, our soul.
The lake pulls down her screen,
rice paper thin and stipple brushed with every shade of
red and violet-blue. Our eyes
can hardly know where water ends and skies
begin. We listen, wrapped in a duck-feather quilt, as
the
balm of night sweeps to its pillow where
we lie in our boat of dreams.
29
sep 2000
emery I'm
a misfit in his world
and he in mine
still we tumble to the sand
in
summer's heat to taste
the endless sea beneath
a small exfoliation of
time
while we learn to do
the little
things we've
learned to do before
with
someone new.
10 jul 02
|
small
hours
New sun,
new rain
to dip my fingers in and
flick their beads across
my thin
paper cup, my saucer of
nocturnal thirst. It feels
like weeks, these nights,
I've been a sea running
scared
surging with the tide to
your pale brown eyes,
finding their way
straight through
to my second light. I
think we could break
each other's hearts, I had
said, but they're both
already broken. We could
skate across
the ice beneath the moon,
none
less broken
none less healed. I'm
a sea
running scared
and I look for your
reflection
in the wet of
mirrored
sand, but sometimes
on mornings like this,
your sky turns black
long before
the sun goes down and
we try
to remember
how to cry.
08 june
02 |
his
cologne
on my wool jacket
The moon, dimmed and
fat, reigns in a sky
bleeding brine. I'm
the rebound girl again,
bipolar as a flat line;
he's trading stocks
and vagabonds
a city
block away.
I'm a paintable
nativity scene
raked
under
a month of leaves; flattened autumns
and
soggy buttergolds
that gutter
layer by layer
in small streams of
runoff. April air takes another puff
of four-four time
and
drags it through a straw
from here to there
from here to there.
At the corner, crosswalk rubble
scatters like treasure birds
taking
flight. I burrow my
face against the crook of a sleeve
in my red jacket.
06
apr 02
|
trust
issues:
a self-fulfilling prophecy There were some of
us who ran from relationship to relationship because we were afraid of rejection.
It could be a week, a month, or seeds of seasons scattered in a void, but soon
- for reasons we'd pay for in secrets and sighs, it was over again. After the
warm breath on the back of our necks had cooled, there were still he attachments
and elegant emotions - rising too close to our inelegant surfaces. And
we rode the feelings until we were left too long at the top. We'd slam the gates
in deliberate naïveté or play the card of love-sabotage when we meant
to be playing for keeps. By getting out early, we guaranteed we'd never be the
one left behind. We held in harmless hands a power and in it, a mistaken strength.
In search of a rejection-free romance, we took exceptional control of unexceptional
relationships. When the risks were counted and everything was said, done, lost
or reduced, where were our own rejections aimed? ... At ourselves, in a fool's
paradise - with all four walls, as if love could be contained, of romanticism's
possibilities lying at our feet.
10 jul 02
|
| of
moments today is
a lifetime.
our love
is a dayfly
tapping
on
the screen.
25 may 02
|
intimate
mornings It's more than a shift
in the fault lines
as
I drive through
Texas winds
you told me once
were raining sand. I
wonder now
if this is what I feel
or traces
of
a thunder summer morning.
Remember on
the patio, how
I slipped behind you naked
in your chair as
you rolled
a cigarette.
We pushed the world away,
the sun at rest behind a
rain
that carried on its breeze
her mist
across our skin. Your
lips, wet from cloudburst spray,
descended to the
sigh
of my hips, my hollows,
in slow unhurried
sensuality; I'd never
seen
your eyes so finely tuned,
as you bent me back across
the wooden bench.
The sky, a sauna bath, hung
above young deer on
sheets
of silver grass in
a rain-soaked sleepless field.
Your umbrella body
over
mine, dark over light,
the crackling sky crashing
through you; my head,
rocked against the
chimes as you made me
new again.
Above
white dashes
on the heated summer road,
sun-bleached air blows another
gust
of sand across
the windshield of my car.
Pond illusions rise above
the
asphalt, black and softened
in the scorch of afternoon.
From the other side
of
someone else's mid-day
mirage, I thicken into view.
My mouth,
fixed to the taste
of
your salt neck, to
your legs, bronzed in these
days without me.
My heart
rises like a bird
above the sea, spilling over
in all of the
beautiful eccentricities
of you, in the moments put away,
and I
become not woman, but
horse and cart to carry
these armfuls
of
sweet emptiness.
12 aug 02
blndrspt02
|
the
last thing in the world She swallowed his words fast before
the
taste: six slithering oysters of words,
every echo she had ever heard
pinned
beneath an echo’s claw.
She could pick them out in the dark:
words
lifting from paper in small chokes
or trolling through the bend of a cord.
I never wanted to hurt you.
It was the last thing he wanted to do
and
the last thing all of them did.
02 jan 02
blndrfeb02
uncomplicate
me
unmoved
are we
reluctantly
set in
our ways. a watermark
in the basin.
or not in love.
enough.
to fine-tune
the differences.
the percent
of the milk.
the side
of the bed.
how many sides
there are now. the lamp switch.
within reach.
the window shutter. how many sides.
there are now.
29 dec 01
blndrjan02
|
7:30
Thurdsay
Today a bright red sun
was swallowed
up in
bloodstone drifts of cloud.
How many nights do
I miss this; it
was
beautiful, as you are. Rain
- finding my face
as I sat, legs stretched
to the quiet of your metal chair
-
sprayed against
the skin near my lips.
For a moment
I could taste you
as the sky set in
beneath the eaves
and gave the
bamboo wind chime
song. 20 june 02
|
november Through
a winter soot of glass
the night side of the moon
sprawls out like a yellow
cat: old
and satisfied
across the wool duvet.
Moonlight watching
grey
blue rain fall down without
a sigh without a wonder
for some why or for
some
what if it all ends, through
limbs of river birch
through rain-soaked
leaves,
as I look on from
painted plastered gaps of space and
count
the days I count the nights
without his rolling thunder
soul, his gentle
mornings. 08 jan 02 |
sill
of a window The sun is cold this
morning.
The moon
hangs worn as an old
apple
on a summer windowsill heavy as my heart
when I think
of your sadness. Of course,
this is meaningless.
Living in my
daydreams
will never lighten
the skies
of your Seattle.
23 may 02
|
carving
dreams We grab through air,
dull serrated
knives
of us
looking for
the wooden block.
But when letting go
we find
the
universe, waiting
in our hands.
13
jul 02 |
take
my breath beautiful
man
the majesty
of broken sky
divided
to its purest form
07
mar 02 |
star-crossed Their
cupids had
a death wish
(he loved her like the wind)
dancing close
within
the
jagged lines.
(she loved him like the wind)
How can they pretend
the
summer ends?
03 sept 02
dancer
we
dive
we float
and sink
again
in an ocean
of becoming.
10
june 02
|
|
