
Nocturne
The night is a black dress
draped over the arms of a couch, she whispers
stars plucked like cherry blossoms.
A smokey hush fills the room
exploding
Flint Ridge Overlooking the Klamath River
The back of green is sunrise—
you rustled our tent, craved alms of damp and pine
and broke into a compass of morning
a robin’s soprano trill, shrill
a bluejay’s tenor, harp
a kingfisher’s alto, bass
of the Spotted Owl asks “who?
who are you, who
enters this forest deep,
who are you, who
will not let me sleep?”
It was my grandfather who
centuries ago trembled on windy nights
when stove warm flutes bansheed, who
then traded his plough for pickaxes, turning water
into mineshafts and mineral rights.
Now human voices who inherited grandfather’s concrete reverberate
across this still and silent spruce swept land echoing
the axe-heavy frontiersmen who skinned red redwood
and pine at the Klamath’s bloodied mouth.
Soon we will lose even this moment. I kissed your strawberry hair,
closed the sky from your eyes, and traced black veins ferrying nightshade
across your breasts. The never-ending circle of needles and damp fell
on a broken compass. I still search for you, not knowing who you are anymore.
I walk deeper into the forest and gaze towards my campsite,
from the rear margins of the forest, and I am hardly present
I no longer know who I am,
dissolved into forgotten spaces.
Unanswered, the Spotted Owl
flies away.
Aubade for Lisa
Brown hair black hair in full moon sleep.
On your right shoulder I trace a cherry tree tattoo
blossoms into heat-shaped
stone fruit. Between your shoulders your father’s surfboard,
I trace from memory its angel wings.
We danced to big band swing off the shoulder of the Hornet
painted seascapes on our knees at Big Sur under protection
of Orion and stone tides. I watched your eyes drink deep the sea.
You watched me swallow the tides.
We drank deep each other to water our rose garden where French lace, silks,
and Alexandrine thorns pricked hand and thigh.
But the first dawn rose promising to grow stone into shelter
shelter into sanctuary, sanctuary into home.
Under full moon light I kissed your hand, the black
nail polish of yesterweek flaked and imperfect, like your hair in the morning
twinged with youthful grey and your eyes half shut under bedroom lights rage against
the morning light.
When the dawn comes tonight will be a memory too.
A new day has begun.
I woke alone with strands of black cherry hair
and chamomile rose, lapsang oolong perfumed in my sheets
I never knew it’d be so bitter
to be alone,
alone, and without you—