You dance, yes you dance
with breath against
my neck
in front of hardback orange
and crimson fiction.
You pause to catch my
scent and start again.
You stroll, fingers wrapped
around my fingers. You walk
against the crossing signs
as if you were the moon and
it the shadow.
Oxford shoes looking up,
pointing the way down 6th Street.
Nestled against the wind
sweeping through mountains of
high-tech architectural design.
Glass and stone.
How many tattoos, you ask
would it take to cover the harm,
to cover the hurt you hide?
How many butterflies
would shuffle against my skin
like a parasol to shelter all of
the bad good-byes.
The wounds of persimmon.
The cuts of cattle skulls left on a
garden wall
of seedless grapes
of morning glory.
How many?
One Lilliputian butterfly?
Or a swarm of dye around
my ankle bracelets.
Only one, kind sir
and even she would take away
with laughing wings
as she lilted to the air -
for she has put bad dreams to bed
without their supper
where they wake to find you
dancing down 6th Street.
You and your oxford shoes.

2 sept 2000
blndroct2000
6th Street, Austin

in khaki

when they led me to
the room of no colors.
crisp white sheets
stamped carelessly
in black

and left me there
at the blunt end of a long corridor;
when I found you like that
could you feel me?
could you feel my arms
reach up
like pulling curtains from the walls,
they tried to climb the cable
fast, they understood.
I didn't.

I dressed you in
your new clothes,
stretching tags until
the plastic snapped -
the ones we charged in
Springtown, you remember,
the night before.
I have stories to tell

and love songs.
I'll sing loud with no tears
until my throat chokes dry
like swallowed pepperweed.

I'll clip my nails and
play my gibson,
stay and listen -
for just this Sunday morning.

I have stories to tell and
pleas to make, can you
see them in me,
can you hear?
still twenty-five
and dressed in khaki.

12 mar 2000
Bruce

choosing my camisole

Autumn nudges through an open
window into my dressing room,
where I brush my hair across
shoulders, empty of touch.

The battenberg swells
in a cool rush of air,
the wooden shutters
sway like a pendulum; they beacon
another year without you.

Carefully, I mist cologne
to reach the tender sides of my seams,
my neck, my navel, the places where your
head would nest.

Far away you sleep without me,
on the wrong side of my soul.
Another bedside table holds
your watch, your water glass.

18 sept 2000

eachother

I would remember the silence
of a moonless night

though glints of autumn trees
rushed past in gilded lumens

He coupled his hand over mine
and in that moment taught

to write across the wind
two words as one.

20 feb 2000

now said

how many words
how many times
will it take to say
goodbye
impossible it is
to get it right
mockingbirds know

outside the morning window
they bathe themselves
in sunlit concrete fountains

we have said it kind
to help the other
we have said it like an angry sky
to help ourselves
we have said it with tears
melting both from love
and from regret - it is done

it will hang in air
a pentatonic scale
like an neverending chanting
of the mockingbird
it will never be as fair
it will never be as perfect
as hello.

16 mar 2000


valentine orchard

Fast behind the frost
of February,
she carried home a tender tree of
unborn blossom,
a living Valentine.
Young leaves brushed the tinted
windows as she drove - mulberry,

mandarin, or cashmere cherry.
Keepsakes of the heart
bound to eager limbs,
bare and impatient to begin.
He dug each year through
rock and shallow soil
with a blunt and rusting shovel edge

until a gathering of trees
danced before a drapery of sky,
like a clothesline strung
in pastel sprays
flanking sunset and soul.
White bloomed the Manchurian;
peach buds sprung like

ornaments in the night.
It was not a secret garden,
but a lovers' Valentine;
a monument for two that multiplied
every second week
of every second month
every vernal season of their lives.

14 feb 2000
(these trees were chopped down
July 2003 by the new owners)

perspective

April is gone again. My eyes
look up into a bath of onyx sky
soft undersides of white-

tipped doves shining pale like
fish in water
gold washed silver, thirty or more

in skies of night.
They flock, they glow as
vaguely as the city vapor lights.

(silence)

They leave behind the
space they once absorbed
like prayers and

promises and
love's exchange
they take

into an arch of sky
driven as we are
by life inside the life

above the grayscale line
of fence
and gravel road.

24 apr 2000

day 14: arrival and transfer

I am the blur of smooth pebbles,
a clouded silhouette of petal blooms
holding to the railway timber.

I fall gently to the rush of the
train raging past as sudden as
a storm; its sides etched like

frescoes decorating ancient cavern
walls, in angry challenges and
aerosol confessions of love.

Inside the berth, is a stillness
viewed from the picture window where
his forehead rests.

The train's throat groans, dry
as a summer drought.
It has seen cooler fields of blue meadow grasses

seeded with ponds and well-kept cottages
and little fishing boats, tied and ready.
But still it returns, trumpeting through the

muddle of lovers and transitory
scrawlings on the wall.
From the lower bunk he looks

deliberately through the glass to
comprehend the man he has become.
He wonders at pieces of earth flashing by, to center

any sense of it all. Too near to the quick,
too close to nerve endings of life, creosote
hangs in the air.

Look away from the dusted blooms.
Look away from the pebble's reach,
across the meadow to the clearness of a

rising hill, to streams raining down a
pine-covered mountain peak.
The deep hollow sound bellows full

until the humming of a train falls
to the quiet of
a single petal bloom.

11 sept 2000

all things being unequal

bothered by opaque
stockings
he regrets to say
they turned him off
and continues to apologize
too many times
not an indifference
so much, as a point driven home
rattling in the trunk
with every turn
all I needed was his cue
to be his dazzling
play-pretty
below the observation
landing
the other
and I smile
delights in every wrapping
silk, opaque, or otherwise
like a child with candy waiting
the sumptuous center
the toy surprise
magic rings and trinkets
drop and clink like porches full
of chimes, all the talismen and
women gather round
standing still to listen
and to watch a lover's fire
leave bright trails of light
from my enchanted man.

03 feb 2000

not of words

The sanded floorboards lie
stripped like empty bleachers
side by side, beneath the blonde veneer

of his piano. It rings in song. Candles
and sonatas and still wet varnish stirring,
swirling in a cocktail of air. He, as

free-form as my fingertips. Wrapped around
the sound they finger-paint, they dance
like nymphs through

fields of black and ivory keys. A tender
voice set free from strings of wire, and trills
that feel like tips of tongues. He is music

playing in a stillborn world.
Building, falling, like hesitant rain.
Shifting, like a cat in its

elastic skin along the caulked and puttied
windowsill, to unexpected
dissonance and constant aching for resolve.

piano score to
In Jaimy's World
M Madison