are the worst, often perched
on a ledge at the edge
of a mountainside,
the danger palpable…

Can I take you somewhere special?
It’s quiet, but not literally
It exists in fragments of peace
Between strong-minded but gentle-souled
Tears from the sky

What if we stopped naming stars
before they’re born—
stopped dreaming up doctorates
in ultrasound rooms,
or calling chubby fists
“just like Dad’s baseball grip”?

To listen to a gentle rippling
blues and folk melody
and realize its one
of yr own and you’re
sitting under the same
immeasurable sky of feeling

Blue skies, seventy degrees
but it’s almost November,
the chrysanthemums hanging on.
Prickly burs fall
from the Chinese chestnut tree,
some stems loosen, others still cling.

Thick ice in the driveway’s pothole thaws.
Three birds discover the puddle. I watch
from my warm, mouse-colored sofa as
they flop and shriek, bouncy in the frigid…

We live
in the future,

but only
for a moment.

Look, mom! The little yellow bird is back!
my littlest one cries, she, who is not yet too old for wonder.
The bird yellow like a shadowed daisy,
bigger than a hummingbird but so tiny, delicate…

I ached for dreams that galloped
through my head long ago—
fever dreams of Paul and George,
flying like Superman, in a red cape…

Joy has large and small containers as in the aftermath of a welcoming in-person chair yoga class
I hear Led Zeppelin acoustic ballads on the car radio while driving home from Lenox town to the
grace of a solitary chickadee’s contented melody from a rooftop as I pass below while walking.

One heart one bod
experience at first handsy
escalating intimacy

Can you picture it?
Could you make the leap if I asked politely?
Cruising through the interstate, one hand on the wheel, the other on my thigh,
Can you feel that rush, that high?

Sucks all the helium he can
to escape the blood hound on his tail
for petty thievery & having too much fun.

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?