Promise
I bring you almonds and apricots,
fresh dates and country oranges.
You have stitched your name in
the very world around me,
I see it in every grain, every inch
of all the orchards and oceans of earth.
I think of you in each movement of the clock,
and in each moment of summer—
You’ve re-written my life, and made real
my steps down the mountain path
to the valley of wildflowers and August winds.
I will follow you anywhere,
through the hours of dim isolation,
to the other side of paradise.
You’ve called me out of the grim winter
to meet you here in the soft morning rain,
away from the others, here where we were always
going to be, in our shared silences, our own
summer of quietly spoken promises, where at last
I can touch your hands and kiss your brow,
and bring you almonds and apricots,
and put a white jade ring on your finger.
Mind of Fire
The shadow on the wall grows wings —
The shadow grows
white flame
in the empty room, always empty. I’m here,
but gone into cold
interiors
as the shadow burns on, its wings now
nothing but fire, a frigid,
thinking inferno—
a fire stretching out time—its engine
like the pinprick of a
black hole
in this deserted house, where I know nothing but
my absence, and my place in
the conflagration—
my only home, where I began, where now
I’ve ended into
purgatorial
quiet—a dream an ancient blizzard had,
the one with the mind
of fire.
Moonfall
Fly, fall,
plunge
into ruin,
into blue
doom, fly,
falling in dark
matter, away,
down the galaxy
road
to a black hole.
Sink away, out
of yourself,
blue-red
and burning
moon, faithful
friend, even in
your calamity,
and in my own
and final
ruin.
Unpublished
I’ve ruined so many pages of my life---
dog-eared, stained, and burned them out back
in a furniture fire.
My book
goes unfinished and unread,
neglected and left in abandoned houses
where it wilts into dusklight
and knows only graves
of the dust . . .
Words
drain from its pages
as I become, myself, a single word
lost somewhere, wilting and withering
on the last page of a book.
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