All the Stories You Have Yet to Tell Me

As indifferent as a dictionary

With your calm blue eyes

You lie there

Wearing a black Moroccan tunic

Embroidered with a story.

That loose, unencumbered dress

Is well-suited for your nomadic life.

I have always wanted to hear it,

The narrative stitched in the fabric

Like three philodendrons
My mother let die

That cold Michigan winter

I turned fifteen.

You get up,

Light a cigarette,

Pour a cup of coffee,

Poke poke poke your iPhone.

I am thinking of Kuwait.

The Bedouin said these rocks

The sound of water and sand

Whispers in the deepest ear.

You Lying There on the Horizon

Tonight rain falls

Like a language we can’t speak

Choking Vicksburg Mississippi

My theory being that

Speech is too quickly

Taken for granted

That we don’t feel

This awesome gift

For what it is

Let alone all the children

Our words drop

All over the place

Does that seem a little too Buck Owensesque?

To invoke a New York poet

Frank O’Hara said

Since when has sight

Replaced feeling?

Tonight I offer you

An umbrella of sweet margaritas

I offer you

Faraway lips upon taut excuses

The very nub and point

Tonight my heart is a California winter

Scorched by spring

What the Small Insufferable Things Become

We only know our names when we hear them

Was the strangest thing I ever heard.

What does it mean?

That we exist

Only in the mouths of others?

I tell you this because

I think of you as bright and sad.

I think of you always

As a face I seek.

I seek your familiar blueness

Like a crow distracted by a thought

Of shattered glass.

Remember when I was a crow?

Remember when I was in Iraq?

I was always distracted

By the hot wind

That carried day’s last

Dry thoughts into evening.

I was distracted by a plastic bag

Snagged on concertina wire,

Fluttering like a tattered flag.

If We Then Abandon This

Can you feel this?

O can you feel 
How we veritably bristle

Rapturous assumptions of words?

Ideas insinuate the text

Each with such tenderness

O voluptuous intensity

These words drowning

Night's naked discourse!

Love in the Digital Age

To be idiomatic—

A wink in every word
Like don't pull my leg

Or break a leg—
Is so much better than

Emoticons and silly animation

Today your email didn’t come

And Vicksburg was happy!

No bad news

Poetry is not bad news

Most of the time

Poetry won’t walk out with or on

You laugh with all the drunks

But dammit it’s true

The Glacier Sings Full Loudly of the Centuries

To be standing clearly

Alone in the blue wind

Like your eyes

So beautiful and clear

But never really trusting

I want to kiss you and I do

Imagine something like that

Me standing in the blue wind

So shaggy and so perfectly sculpted

Blue instead of air

Instead of you.

In the Clear and Plain April Air

Three weeks ago the wind blew

Toward me particularly such a loose hello.

I didn’t see it coming in the naked truth.

Three weeks ago I was old and now so

Toward the nearest words what?

I wear glasses more than I need

I think. These are government glasses.

Tax dollars paid for me to have them

So I wear glasses more than I need

I guess. I’m wearing them right

Now in fact though they’re only for

Distance and reading. Hello

Is easier to say with glasses on

I think. Hello. See?

Three weeks ago wind in my eyes

Progenitor of something or other.