It is a spring day scoured by heavens,
erect wind chime concertos singing
like dainty sopranos in the susurrus
aroused from winter’s brittle seal

You are in white, hair parted so
your fine, muscular retinas flit with red
engraved markers in a field, solemn with wear
these little recalcitrant mazes of you

Knowing nothing of what they’ve seen,
we trace our lives on specks of map
all intertwined like interstate highways
branching, circumnavigating, ending in big
confusing fields of old industrial waste
without caution or reason, just ending, here
coarse in your corroding esophagus
no longer used for smelting steel

When did you become so rotund,
you ask in response to my stone throwing,
bashing in your cubic paned windows, wondering
why not say what we mean to say
when we’ll waste lifetimes pursuing
the proper words for very simple things,
do a jig about our fading time
writing novels and buying cars
because courage eludes us, proving
we are ever fearful of elucidation
preferring our murky cataracts of obfuscation

Much lurks beneath our surface,
waiting for us to delve under
but instead we’ll decide to be quiet a moment,
let the air circulate through, swearing
in an impromptu intimate huddle
we both hear some haunting sirens
clumsily rattling their bones out in the sun



II

This quaint, embalming zephyr lilts and lifts
while the sweetly blue-green grass wimples
under west wind stretched cirrus, diaphanous wisps
of elongated, blood soaked gauze

East thousand distended bellies
of pregnant cumulonimbus
imposing faced and grim like El Capitan,
scowl at nature’s charity, a slender arched prism
grown westward with the new wagon trains

You are in white, light falling in warm dollops
through the window behind you so your shadow
puts me in the shade firmness of your face,
a puddle I do not recognize, beginning to harden with cold
now that we’ve stopped our nightly traverses

Do we end like a hail storm, thrust into ephemeral life
but for a tumultuous fall, dead quicker than it could be born
left scattered and disparate for the melt,
or is it the way summer effusively becomes autumn,
evenings of unannounced cold amidst days
imperceptibly losing ever more light?

We are melting with the whole day,
here apart with our pebbled memories
spilling about the floor as our solid selves
liquefy and pool together for warmth

(there’s me touching your forearm, coagulating
with your helter-skelter hair in the open window,
and there it goes together, pumped on out
for a deep human breath, oxidized amongst
the rest of this messy, forgettable world)



III

Dusk and the world exists like a shadow
the flowered trees like globes of snow
undulating their way to earth in the dark
but caught, suspended by some law defying draft

You are in white, your hands flushed
little half moons of dirt worked under your nails
You’re so incandescent you’ve broken
night’s wintry cocoon, spring spread out prematurely

How I’ve perceived this sudden warmth
is no different than how I perceive a rainbow
tangible in sight, in my faltering heart
but lacking reality in my hands, my fingers
which are no less a part than vital organs
(you’ve had far more contact with my fingers
than my liver or lungs or small intestines)

but you, free of temperature or season,
are tangible in my beat, in my breath
in the calloused rings of my very ends,
you will go grey with the follicles of my hair
and laugh in the wrinkles around my dying eyes



IV

The day has come and thrown about its wind,
its rain, its spatterings of sun and shade
so that now it can dissolve into the gentle flow
of days past slowly tumbling into the abyss

Then I, too, will pass, having thrown about my few words
and hopes, grown cloudy at times, wet at others,
bearing the barometric markings of my lovers and friends
into our own ideal river, swamping the banks downstream
so that they will someday bear fruit and grow ripe

You are in white, efflorescent with youth and life ahead
where I am but an accioccatura in your vast symphony,
acarpous and run dry, I will watch from the mezzanine,
brimming in silent rapture as your string section ascends,
waiting for my small little clamor of dissonance,
the two of us at the end of things
sitting in a window watching the day fade,
you in white and more beautiful than I remember,
me in love with you but unable to find the words