Poetry

I. My fingertips bear the scars of love,of flesh broken, torn apart.Your thumb, cold against my wristwhen you pierced this skinwith a worn pocket knife.The chasing warmth of our fingerspressed together, a smear of bloodthat gave us our secrets.How you kept those secrets goingin the rinse of the oceanas it pulled me into its graspleaving…

The world was suffocating at the end.Strange to think here,in this other world like a dead lung,ions stripped away by solar windswhile Earth still cradled in her mother’s arms It was thirty years too early for this.The last of the reefs disintegratingoff the Florida KeysPawpaw took his last breath,shouted it from twin barrels,painted himself on…

the dead are leavesstapled to windbreaks whisper of antspungent crisp of melaluca barkthe dead are jetsam in the whorlof muddied rivers the dead are raised, stone cherubsin Nouvelle-Orléans they cannot keep their distance the dead give treatises on the livingas only the dead can they do not know their names an uttering, hymnal deadechoes of…

Pink cap over shadow’s scalp,skin papered, pale, transparent.A child watches,color flowering from this forever bedas we teach the ways to say goodbye. Driving through the night,I listened to your memoryfor an uncoordinated timeas you never should have been,ought to remain:                  a Picasso woman(laughing in your mirror at…

the earth lay with her hair backrivers tinted bronze and streaked with goldby the sun’s setting my love folds the sky in layerscolors blending at the west horizon i breathe with the tideat evening, these shallowsmean to consume methe waters lapping at soft grasses to invite her east-rising shadow stars blink, each a different pulsehinting…

1.Early morning: crowds begin to gather, randomly, then with purpose, each with their particulars. The hobbyists caravan of telescope & camera, filter & lens,  claiming small bits of ground, the best views of the sun. Young couples stroll the waterfront trying on cheap b-movie shades with anticipating laughter. A group of children walk single file…

if– mourning’s taking Shakespeare’s form, in part,replacing ev’ry [didn’t] with a [did],circles having outer w(hole)s to impart,i am bic pen ta me ter on a cidthen Death! (as well can have His hold on Spring,for even i ) as in Love as i amcannot compare with ev’ry living thingin mothering my wasn’t-ness: O Lamb,to strike…

aka The earth is red, a base of perception.Her words sound like the flow of lavacooling, deepening to black,There is a physicality to these wordsthat spans our language:the name for soul is a jewel made of red earth.It is the same for blood, the color of its voice:rivers in the shapes of people,chimes accentuating a syllable,or…