Hopelessness—caked in dirt
and tossed aside,
like the bird
with a broken wing

You may wonder who will reach
down to perform the necessary miracle,
and when and what: the white bandage,
pristine; the laying on of hands; the soup
and sleep and bread and bed.

This morning I woke to slow rain,
and remembered waking with you
sprawled across my bed in a toccata
of bones muscles skin and breath.

A swan,
His neck a staircase into
The white clouds,
Wings, oars
Of silk,
Toiling
Against
The waves of
Water…

The first time Elizabeth jumped, James was on the ground with a tarp; / they were in different worlds and the two had never met.

“No one understands me,” Elizabeth said. She was lying / on the floor of her pink-striped bedroom and was talking to the ceiling.

Leaving the hospital, she said:
“Today, everyone looks like something I ate.”
Right now? I asked, scanning the parking lot.
“Yes. And everyone throughout my life.”
I thought so. Most of the meat
Loaf I digested resembled
My eighth-grade class.

O phalanx of clouds,
formed against your own shadow,
diorama of the maxim that armies,
like lovers, come in pairs—
promulgate now in bulleted wisps,
conformist’s dark room dripping in chemical
& negative & clothes-pinned evidence

on the sunbaked
patio, a little girl,
discovers a snake
sunning itself
on a boulder
she runs into
the house
jubilantly reports
the presence…

I’m so sorry you don’t have the vision
I have. Like when Lesbia
showed me the new Cure cassette in ‘92
I was able to pick out
what would be the most popular songs
in two seconds.

color
came to me suddenly
not blood, but red, reddish
and burning. Only

at first abrupt,
like a punch line, a
jawbone or
hallway carved

The sky, a flawless blue,
the kind of California day,
that gets under your skin.
Scaffolds holding up the heavens
stretching against celestial infinity.
Is there a placeholder for me
in that expanse?

Flamingoes all pink and proud
at the Junior Museum & Zoo.
Kids & grandparents all aflutter
flocking to public feeding time
in a fluff-and-strut club of cute.

no music, only the daylight, the green
of the trees growing, so fresh and bright,
imagine a leaf, a single one of them
held to your cheek, in its chill,
its refusal of heat, this early in the year,
the stars so far from here, the birds
in their lightness going about their business

Discarded on the train tracks,
a crushed bag of potato chips,
bright red label glaring.
Two bus drivers linger
by their idling vehicles—
one bends to his lighter,
the wreath of smoke
drifting briefly

Evelyn’s caramel colored
fingertips rub center of an orchid.
Soft saturated purple petals

awaken her eyes, like discovering
carving of ancient writings.
The Nile River on cave walls.

Are you listening? I have access
to all the words, at least

hypothetically. Language, emotion,
cognition commingles in combinations

infinite, experiments replicable,
but only barely, in theory

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