it's a recurring dream.  the one in which
you arrive late and the wind is sweet,
swaying your coat as if it is a mandarin robe.
you tell me you have been lonely, that
the company of spirits is not fulfilling
because some of them are deaf and cannot speak
and some are speaking this new century's
incomprehensible language.

i hold your hand, study your fingers,
and tell you, you don't understand people
so why worry about ghosts?  a sudden
gust of wind lifts your hair aloft like
autumn leaves.  you don't know enough about life,
never mind trying to understand death.

the atmosphere in the dream changed; there was
a sudden storm.  you walked away
down some zig zag steps and sheltered
under a cypress tree on the edge of a cliff.
i waited for you with
the patience of water raising grass.

at last you climbed back up to me
and your arm stole around my waist.
your fingers grazed my breast.
hold me tighter,  i moaned, divested of my dignity.
we stayed like that through day and darkness,
saturated with sunshine and moonlight
and radiating the silence you had brought with you

until we were gathered into stone

1.  a dilettante writes poetry while people die all over the world
2.  a visionary writes poetry while people are born all over the world
3.  at moments of solitude poets awake crying for no reason
4.  night after night an endless dream leaves a circle forever incomplete
5.  the dust of time has clouded my heart
6.  in my world, love between people is more important than the debts they have incurred
7.  loneliness is as tall as i am
8.  love is always in the metaphor
9. wild grass is taking root where your footsteps fell
10. a romantic life is love written on the water,
11. stirring up undercurrents of pain
12. those who do not love will never understand this
13. the oak is reluctant to let go of its leaves
14. but its luminous reflection in the ripples is waving goodbye
15. in my heart
16.i want your most tender love to wrap around me like a banana peel
17.what we know is just a dream,
18. reality is what we cannot imagine.
19. the scars from a knife and a kiss are the same
20. you must forgive both
21. in the depths of a mountain shrouded in mist
22. love and hurt spring from the same source

the truth is:  that inspirational light went out
when you left. has it really been that long?
the thought saddens me beyond measure.

my brainage sump pump is backed up and
inside my head is a flood that
cant make sense out of nothing.

still standing at the window, i wave, sigh,
whisper, "see you in paradise..."

i have traced your name in the constellations,
falling leaves, shower of sparks from the stove, and in
the chinese ink bleeding on mulberry paper
as if in perpetual rain

at night, my naked body is pale in the moonlight
and wakeful with promises
i cant stop believing

you, in dreams, move quietly into me
like the sea, the altar of my hair taken down,
strands spread like seaweed--
the rest of the house, silent,
afraid to breathe
below the waterline of sleep,

and i imagine your pillowing arms
around me as i drown...
no more thoughts of death,
no more crying without reason,
no more disappointment to come when
the light has gone out and dreams are
all that remain.

nothing is taken from the moment.
life is perfect.
outside an owl screeches above the shadows
that reach into the house
and touch the glow of our faces
that are sad and stubborn with hope

i am here to ask you : can love alone
make this work, like the silent, tenacious
spreading of emerald moss, like the greening
of a grey heart?

i'm not sure if what i heard was you
calling my name,    because
i was so busy calling yours--
as if calling is possessing
and each time i breathed your name
it would bring you closer

and my mouthing of your name  really
seemed to say, why are you never clearly mine?
why have we met so late?
why did you suddenly decide
to appear in my irresolute heart?

in the overlapping of love and departure,
in the drowsiness of dream and waking,
an error of falling into someone else's heart
becomes a double error, yours and mine.
is this 'forever'?
is this the possessive pronoun 'ours'?

is it existentialism, the tao?
chang tzu? afternoon tea? an offer of protection?
a couple of borrowed verses?  a decision to come
and not to come  that then becomes forever loneliness?
a language that can exceed each other's love?

the last love poem
like a last leaf falling at summer's end
is a lifelong memory
of your restraint
and tenderness

you've seen how i bandy big words
around with such bravado.  i only do it to amuse you--
in real life i am unpretentious, a word too brief
for such a long bedtime story.
my knowledge is a broken guess,
my voice a syllabary on a series of scrolls
where practice makes a lineage of error.

my eyes seem to beckon dusk but you are
never close enough to see my eyes before
the dark descends. my heart beats an aggravating
tympanum of the gods.. so what, then, is this poem? for those
who drink, a book with torn pages; for those
who don't, a glass half full of whiskey,
crumbs of eaten sound, a single tooth, a lonely tongue,

a proscenium arch, an empty stage, a rickety apron,
a list of no dimensions--a study
of the knower, the known, and the knowing
as yet unknown, a kite's string unspooling,
punctuation with no words.

is this making any sense to you?
i meant to say :  the autumn sun
touches the horizon of love's remembered past
so late that i cannot cry nor sing in this
unspoken hour with the wind twisting toward the sky
as from your heart the stone of love describes a trajectory--
the long path of suffering, the vision and the dead star--

its light locking memory