Or I Show You the Repetitions of My Rifle

There’s a different person in each sparkling

Occasion and yes a resentful mirror always

Remembers at best bitterly the way I touch

The lip of your glass but who cares it is night

We are in a restaurant and dogs are barking

Outside at an ocean where maybe monsters

Move in the drowned cockpits of a lost squadron

I don’t know from whale-bate really because

Everywhere our words melt into forms of fish

Believe me I think of you in that city all your life

A necklace of jewel-like moments this one too!

I think of the picture you took of dried flowers
You might have meant to water and everybody

Thumbed the picture up when you posted it online

Your Voice the Ravenously Casual Sky

There you are again astringent oracle

Shaking those incandescent bells you keep

Roped around your neck those rowdy bells

As radiant as your eyes when hard water

Melts and you are always a little too young

For me to understand always raining or

Snowing when the air is clear and April 
Is at the door which could mean summer 
Might not come before disgusted roots
Begin to cough maybe your arms feel thin 
This year maybe you remind me that you 
Understand me better than I do you O my 
Insistent friend my lines are brittle ice and 
As pale as your gloriously mean mauve tongue! 

I Never Tell You This Because

Your throat’s dry with the vertiginous breath

Of the sleepwalker now you feel at night against

Your face a heat no longer burning prodigious

Alley cats away so you promise your spunky navel

Bitterly trembling odors that you might as well call

Fragrances and there’s this quiet gasp of laughter

When you say next time my dear my voice won’t

Come along with me smiling indifferently you say

What do we think of slim girls now! what do we

Think of cats O paradise! the ocean heaves a sigh

And swells heavy thoughts beneath the sun and

Silver-slivered clouds—these contrails left behind

Passenger jets heading to Hawaii maybe Guam

Though I don’t believe it either way

Not Tonight the Morning

And we see so many things writhing in the sky

Of the deluded shoe that breaks its own lace

The sky of the pony kicking clumps of celestial

Daffodils the sky of your voice and how it sounds

When you talk to someone else but you think of me

Kicking stones barefoot beneath the sky that wiped

Its forehead on the rag of my youth the sky that

Yodeled dirt roads and pig trails the sky that sighed

Nights after days and days after nights like the tired

Look sometimes you walk around wearing when

You see the sky that holds something for our own

Good and it could be our bodies are sore with these

Moments loosed from desire under the sky dancing

Dancing to the very end of silence 

And We Suffer a Most Untheatrical Life

Rain thrums the roof and rat-a-tats the window

Just as the winter voices you imagine in the bible

And in Goethe where even the ink has its own

Thoughts of paradise and you can forget about

Italian beaches and the pleasure of being

Together in the same darkish garden watching

The same moonish paving stone sink into a path

That might have led toward terrible terrible youth

The heart empty in its knowledge of unaquaintance

The way you walk in your best outfit alone at night

Loveless and lampless down the same lane where

One hot Mississippi afternoon we saw the river

Flow past Vicksburg looking as tepid and tan

As the milk and coffee in our daughter’s cup