Yes Many Things Will Happen Between Now and Then

You’re too young to remember the rather felinish

Attitude I once leveled at the world but I was

Younger then too and exceptionally catnipish

Brass buffed brigadiers could not ruffle the feathers

Perpetually protruding from my lips like frisky whiskers

Back then I shrugged off all assaults to my impish

Indeed my imperially mischievous  independence

Me so casual with borrowed style me so haute

Watch out I'd purr in a lover’s ear I bite Meow!

But that was all so many years ago and now

I’m only an aging mutt who smuggles this brick

Of words across what border?  These days what

Preoccupies me are the slender letters the vowels

And the consonants the sound of absent flowers

We Gasp as Laughter and Desire

We sit and watch the last sailboat chase bleak

Ineluctable clouds over the evening horizon and

Then you say sing me a song! Dance me a dance!

You say offer your voice and body to impoverished

And penetrable night and find our frightened selves

Opening in those distant clouds that strip us cold

For the waiting minotaur sniffing each rippling wave

Centuries and centuries before we were born

Huffing all over hell and back for our singular scent

We who know there will never be a moment more

Like this one this wind we face these leeward spouts

Racing shoreward like diamond scales flaking from

The broad back of the serpent sea you say O sing

And dance for me for we always find us in the wind!

Our Eyes in Say Half an Hour

We are exactly at the urgent orchards when

The moon resounds like a knock on a door

And we refuse O how we refuse to say

Moonstruck though the word is on these

Voluptuous pears we can smell the sound

Sexy and simple as fear the way dim light

Falters here beneath these trees the way

We hear a crisp guitar and faint castanets

Hooray! It’s a fandango we feel in our toes!

And as we dance in three time a bruised fog

Floods the hysterical grove a sluggish knee-deep

Current pushing our legs with languid boredom

The way the devil’s clerks recite fiercely slow

Inventories of what and in what language?

Author Reading

How We Receive the Offering

So here come all the prophets offering us their

Flowers of renunciation such roses as to match

The color of your lipstick and today we see how

Even the sun pauses in its soft-headed journey

But only briefly and bemused and casting this  

Drool-squandered light to efface our smiles

Our squinting gestures when we finish mending

The frayed sky these modest grandiosities yet

We have not forgotten the prophets bearing

Our nameless childhoods in their goat-eyes they

Who offer complex disquisitions to the meager 
Shade cast by our twin oblong shadows

Seven years of predetermined hours coming

To a sudden halt at our feet like a new carpet