Walking at dusk again,
and stray lines tap
on my mind’s window,
looking for a poem.

The moment we turn the corner,
a cold front hits,
a carpet of chilly air
unrolled at our feet.
I pull my cardigan tightly
around my chest, hold it closed.

The setting:
Notes in a measure of motion
with dissonant zinc-white daylight splashing
and dancing upon the path
as the horizon softens to a bluer hue, and vanishes

Where are you? the seven-year-old in me
asks as I watch the screen fill
with frenetic red and orange,
billowing gray, curtained black.
Storm, come and still the winds.
Jean Gray, divert the water.

We scooped up the baby,
ramrodded the four year old,
imprisoned the two gray tabbies,
locked them all in the ‘77
white LTD with the green vinyl interior
left to me by my mother upon her death.

Disrupting the murmuring stillness,
the nasally whine of a two-stroke motor,
hedge trimmers whipsawing

weeds framing sidewalk, infiltrating

Life came out of me
a gush of red
Moon-pale I waited those eternal
stretched seconds
for my
arms to be filled
with you.

These arguments, the silences, were all a slow release

a practice run to make the death of us
this love we had, a little easier to finish.

We have come apart, the skin of us slide

to be faceless, naked, the bones of us stand free

Empty as the space
on the back of my neck

where the phantom of your
hand rests just

outside the confines of
my comfortable reach

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

You inhabit me; you narrow to flanks.
Your spineless nerves sear my ventricles.
The creative will will snap your cheekbone—
hush, soil, remains.
Look at the blank between us
squeezing my shoulders.

after all this busying of body, resisting rest
like a toddler hurling her blanket through the night,
after all these efforts manifesting goals, dreading
rejection, willing perfection like a cheerleader

More insatiable than the desire to hoard,
Your fans say death’s a foreign coincidence.

They also say a forgotten coin’s never
Spent, but its odyssey costs us a day.

In 42, you slid like theodicy.
In Get on Up, you put an omen’s plaything

A short talk on pain?
No, no. I don’t think so.
Let’s change the subject.
Let’s deflect our attention.
Besides, what is there to say?

this too shall end.
This too shall end.
This too shall end—
from a place in the basement corner bedroom
beneath boarded-up windows in the back of the house
where she hid from the noise of an Alaskan summer solstice
of driftwood bleaching, refused to watch the harbor pier

willed by the rain
washing over me.
slow at first,
it filled the bank.
drowning in emotions
I built a dam.

Romania is a different culture
It has high mountains
Low valleys
And Roma wandering the roads
Byways and small lax villages.

As sticky as syrup-soaked gruel
eyes closed with dreamy leftovers
eyes closed tightly as if seamstresses
sewed those viscous visions inward.

You are cold,
to my palm,
to my cheek,
cold to my tongue.

Because my head is full of one hundred flowers.
Because dandelions were taken; ditto orchids
(each a bookend on the hardy-to-fragile spectrum).
Because I don’t compete with or covet the rich
and shallow soil but trade in the depths of mingled roots.

Lying amidst terra cotta
shards, in backyard rituals
we stared at a bleaching dot
of sun, hoped tanning might
remind us of no—bad—days. I told you

Home is a mold, that I cast upon you
in the shape of this poem, that fits only you.

Home was the way you described every color:
hunter green, sunset orange, and midnight blue.

When I was a child I went out to the long hedge
along the back of our property. I could crawl
in under the leaves and branches to the middle.

basking in the words
of a poem set aside, long forgotten
the warm glow of verses once familiar
comfort like a soothing bath
taking you back
to another time and place