Trees suffer
this year’s work
to fall to the ground
leaves curl and cup
like beggar palms
Even their fruit
rotates rotten
but the seed inside
clear, the future.
But really
you know
even balloons,
birth-day
party streamers
sometimes die
with the slow
delicate agony
of flowers
that the child is adopted.
Snows translucent as sleep.
Her secret about wanting to die
swims in her breath
a sly brutal eel,
reclines in her
motherhood
while
all she does
in the daytime
is wait for night.
Her bewildered pleasure
in the alchemy of these children
in these precise children
such inaccurate precis of her
of the signs of competence
she generates, grows
_
Lights are
ecstatic explosions
lights
turn on with soft blinks
And rain so hard
it makes muddy
flesh wounds
in the earth
And us,
telling stories
impassionate as
furniture listings
on Craigslist.
Turning,
running
gone.
_
Sunrise is all dragon fire
skies, translucent breath,
and absent headed
searching for keys
to rooms held open.
The fresh heft of friends
in snow, after holiday.
And like all stories,
made of truth
mischief and boredom.
What does it make of me?
You gently lift the baby
slung across my chest,
take her from me,
with more tenderness for me
than our baby.
This is your way.
The other little one
curls warm under the arm
that I drape over him
like a wing stapled close
But really it is your breadth
that shelters us all. Lives.
Snow enslaves all
we walk with staves,
you look like someone
out of the Old Testament.
Your anger when it comes
is just, but still just anger.
Snow is inevitable,
wondrous in volume.
These words turn in me
cold as a key in the lock.
There’s no turning back now.
No. No taking them back.
_
Love, certain parts of me
are almost yours. Started
mine, now given to you.
For your care and time
the sway of your stare
your plea, your pledge
your touch like breath
our every pause a womb
where love is born
every breath
is so much wind-rinsed dust
every breath
begins a thought unsaid
till sweetness
turns speech in two-three tongues
till dreams
drop like calm climbing touch
on legs
galloping deep in the night
to legs
that blossom asleep in bed
_
Pic: With the British Museum dome above us. We talk a lot of trash about The British Museum and their culture of "taking" and ...
