If I Don't Appear

Escape the utmost hour don’t

Stop shouting at divine September

Fill the air between a mother’s open hands

Let words fall like footsteps in a stranger's house

Teach a daughter how to fold the years

So neatly in a purse or pocket

Embrace things as Frank O'Hara said

Freely and with the appropriate sense of space

Kick leaves

Scatter platitudes across a broad lawn

Speak strangely sonorous names

Say perhaps the last day never ends this hazy

Be unforeseen forty paces hence give

Life to small things you can’t remember

Ask for just one bullet preferably silver

Press a blade against the glittering river

Fly a kite into the burnished clouds

Glowing in your sunglasses

To Appear Among Your Many Convolutions

So many things I don’t dare tell you

Like how these flies meander toward some

Deeper understanding and everywhere hail

Waits to fall on your ocean and on the yellow

Town of your girlhood where cats creep

Like oily tufts of smoke so many things

To be consummated so much to forgive

Let other people gather valley flowers

Let them smile with grandiose ambiguity

So many moments from another life so many

Yellow lands I named for you so many poems

I sewed for you from my mauve scars

So many shadows reach tonight the step

You hear stops when you start laughing

Or Take For Instance the Time I Found You

My ill-favored number laughing and laughing

Beside a windowpane where flowers burned

Quietly as a steadfast yellow flame one could

Believe God himself had gently lit breathing

Softly so as not to blow it out O what secret what

Obscure doubt made us smile while enormous

Words fluttered only a room away where things 
Remembered came to light cluttered thoughts 
On a bedside table?  I was thinking of you 
Always dry on a beach you and your wan 
Infidelities your legs gloved knee-high in fine 
Black stockings what gorgeous fortunes!
At once and forever we drew the blinds

All the words had busted wings and street sounds

Offering You This Light in Handfuls

I appear among your many September days

I arrive at the ramparts toting the enemy’s plunder  

I know there is never more than one street to find

I salute your days under the abandoned aqueduct

I see through the breach livid glitter in your hair

I address myself to the heat of your narrow street

I am really at the end of your quiet alley

I the radiant vagrant of your urban murals

I the scent of your closed eyes when you dream

I the water rubbing against your hands

I the water that sharpens knives

I promise to sooth your luminous wounds

I want to hear poetry smoothed by your hand

I am speaking to the wind go ahead and laugh

I have plenty of time to start decomposing

I offer you no gestures nor exceptional signals

I offer you the salubrious humming of mirrors

I offer you the strident whine of humming birds

I offer flowers that complicate their own shapes

I am whistling down empty corridors 

I can hear you almost purring

I bear the mark of your breath on my forehead

I hardly feel my breath when I whisper your name

I assume several lives would not be long enough

I feel clean when I look at you

Demon I Am Undone

Be a cruel specter

a naked empty heart

whose ways of harsh

sweetness quench me

Be everywhere there

were archers fletching

wickedly black arrows

beneath broad arches

Be the double secret

of contrived silence

unseen unAmerican
be the whomever

you are told to be

Be the tiniest tornado

twirling on the tip

of my tongue teetering

like all the eithers

like all the either these

like all the either those

O be murmuring moonlight

bivouacked outside my window

where truncated trees

dance a silly waltz