As If the Stars Were Among Us to Be Reflected

Let’s be bitter and precise as moonlight

Tossing an old pair of stockings on an ottoman

Let’s be urbanely melancholic

Plangent lilies wilting on a bedside table

Let’s catch words

And put them in a box

We say this is all so grand

And our smart phones are no grander

Though always a comfort

We know nothing

We know nothing of long journeys

These river-washed ecstasies

Clean estuaries of our naked gestures

Let’s be vast inexplicable feelings tonight

Twinkling on the necklace of oblivion!

Let's be the eyes of seven crows

Closely watching us

We who speak who are speaking we too

Are alone with nothing

But a faint noise inside us

In Paradise Everybody Got Excited and the Stars

Remember how in paradise you told me

You were made for my eyes?

In paradise the taste of sparkling Shiraz

Went best with the flesh of your voice

You would translate wind

Into the monotonous days of paradise

There were plenty of fronds

And no cemeteries in paradise

It’s official!

Paradise was boring

When will we discover what

We didn’t know in paradise?

O in the interminable days of paradise

We made authentic gestures to the perfect sky!

Our bodies ached from lying

Every night on the cold stone of paradise

When were we in paradise?

When we were in paradise

The sun distilled its blonde honey in your hair

Heh heh heh

Paradise made even the crow chuckle

What

By the way

Is there to complain about paradise?

Without words the route to paradise

Abandoned us

We no longer knew

Where to knock on the door of paradise

We said may the thief’s hand never steal

The horseshoe from the threshold of paradise!

We lost our place as if the book of our life

Belonged really to paradise

When did we make our history into hats

We should have worn in paradise?

One day suddenly before our brows

Was a memory of paradise

Bursting from the oak’s dream of paradise

A lovely sudden leaf

Assaulted our lonely sodden life

The Grammar of Night Ceaselessly Deferred

What is it then

When we see evening

Assume this abominable nonchalance

This glacial indifference?

A ridiculous number of stars

Manages to speak at last

Imagine that!

When we’re together

We have the look of a constellation

Through a glass of water

Sunken suns never meant for us

We have the drowned sound of starry guitars

Imagine time among frozen planets

Their forms constantly more pure

More silent more and more their own bodies

The moon’s a nasty little egg

And needs to stop making poets and things cry

When will you give way

To the questions of my heart?

Imagine tiny metaphysical disturbances

Cosmic plinking so small we just might

Come face to face with ourselves tonight

So what if our love was born

Beneath the indolent gaze of the Pleiades

So what if we live

Briefly and with such delirium

Let’s forego the happy uselessness of day

Let’s join up with the courage of a few dark things

We’ll be feckless Buddhas imperturbably

Astraddle interstellar tempests

Listen! can you hear it?

Night rubs night 

Air trembles

Last year’s leaves 

So tired of being leaves

Finally fall

The Voice We Hear Singing After

Only feathered beating remains

The rhythm of wings in air then

Against a window this brief desirable agony

Each word when it leaves the mouth

Like something breathing this instant

Each word wings rapidly into silence

As if the speaker

Could live passionately only

So long as it takes the sound to dissolve

We understand speech

Does not quell mute unseemly angels nor

Between trees and music

A vast blue sky of uncertainty

Leaning in to kiss us

The Hand that Admits to Fairly Mediocre Magic

The hand reaches but its atoms

Never touch the atoms of your cheek

Simplicity yea even to imagine

Touching well at least the hand is there

The hand above thinning

Hair violated by April storm-wind

The hand offering its empty palm to racket

Trees make among trees

Deep in a pocket the hand

Is drunk with solitude

The solitary hand learns to sidle past

All come hithers all come closers

The hand without a body

The hand without a name

Who can tell the sweetly dour

History of the spellbound hand?

The hand moves then at once

Pretends to be blind

The hand dances and pulls up

Short maneuvers loiters and feints

Evening has made the hand

Wise and brotherly

Why was it made to write—the hand

Resting on the marble breast of silence?

If not the hand whose then

Was that lunar howl?

The hand dreamed you on balconies

Above a desert whispering mute tornadoes

O friend look! the hand extends

The winning raffle the ace of hearts

The hand offers the last

Landlocked sea

The hand reaches but fails to touch you

Even to perceive you who equal ancient oceans

The hand weighs anchor each night

Setting sail for the vast shadows of your heart