sometimes i want to obliterate memory--
those declarations of love, racing heartbeats,
trembling moonlight, and inside it all,
white bones

in the echoes of joy, there is always
a future full of wind-blown rocks
and bleak sunsets with a dusky stain

where passions eventually lie quiet. i know all about
the ebb and flow of things, the dew becoming
crystal frost, the lone goose flying through
the pages full of history, lost to wind and snow

i know you never intended
the long, ignorant nights,
the bewildered days of disgrace
the felled forest of your dreams
the naked star fallen from the sky

i know you never meant to withdraw
into a primeval stillness
coming from the far side of death

the death of all
you once held dear

for the last time of the season,
i light a candle in the stone lantern
and watch it puff a ghostly aureole
over the memory of a garden.

for memory remains untouched
and implacable even as darkness has claimed
the path and clouds flow moonward.
cedar shadows melt into black,

and blackness strokes the window.
this is the exact place in the poem
where lately i run out of words..
the face in the glass seems quiet and cold as the moon,
grave with misgivings, brushed
on the blankness of a page,

unfinished and caught in history

there must be something i can write about quick
before i leave, something
that will make it all right-- everything--
you and me, the world-- all of life--
before forgetfulness
spits us out like pips

every final day is also a first one
(there are lots of platitudes like that,
and there are also lots of heads
on the wall, strangled by picture frames,
lots of flocks of wild geese
licked clean by the light)

it's hard to sort it all out, so i won't
even try. i just know one or two things
that are trite but true-- day after day
we leave ourselves farther and farther behind
unless someone really loves us. then there is always
a home to go back to

xanga is not well!  it won't format, even when i switch to programming mode.

maybe later..

dawn comes and i wonder-- shall i don,
or remove, my mask? bending to the sun,
bright feathers catch the wind.

i wanted to write about something
similar to this approaching morning
with its overdue rain,
maybe something not quite as dark

but would you look at this?
a page as blankly apprehensive
as yesterday's page
a wordless weekend, and
a cup of bitter coffee

and beside me, a precariously piled
hill of bills and books
cascading to the floor
onto the threadbare persian carpet.

you are... somewhere...maybe dead,
maybe alive, maybe your mind
has left you. we have become
prisoners of our souls
at home in our separate cells
for whatever reason

so i watch this gray fury of sky
hoping for some sign of you,
perhaps stumbling down the path
to the old spring in arkansas
carrying your whole life
behind your tired ribs

into time's descending shadows

"

i wish i could find words that have not been ruined."

a chilly night at home, poems pressed
between the pages of my heart
and the mark of a far land, where
the sun highlights fir trees
at a meadow's edge in my dreams.

it almost seems the wind
conveys an urgent message,
like a poem by Szymborska
you have never heard a bird call
with such homesickness as this owl
outside my window, nor a river whisper
with such tender understanding.

the descending darkness stirs
up the sighing leaves covering the ground
and all the sounds of night become
a thousand words, mumbled repeatedly,
like swaying willows on the riverbank
entangling me.

in this unpoetic life of worrying about daily
details,  truth and trust are concealed deeper
than ever in fears that drag on year after year,
in quarrels, in angry outbursts, in suspicion..

and i know that you know
that getting together is easy.
(the thing that's difficult, is staying..)
a face of wind and frost,
the evening sky that turns away--you should know
that i accept these things.  i will not turn
back the pages of a diary to look
for you when you are gone.

last night as i boarded that train
of darkness, i thought of a song
about an illusory butterfly and even after nightfall,
even in high winds and storms,
i stubbornly realize that
love will always be my permanent faith

though the road is long and hard
and meetings and partings unknown,
even with torn wings and wilted flowers,
there is still a kind of persistence and transparency,
although it sometimes seems cruelly silent,

and far beyond reach

 
this is a true story:  my morning
was interrupted by the offer of a cup of magic tea
made from an herb called dreamwort.

when i stirred the tea, it stirred a dream
from which i didn't wake up
for four centuries...

i woke up to the power of my own
authority continued in the past tense
after a long unraveling of one knot after another.

"oh god," you say, "this is going to be one of THOSE poems."
all of you who wish to do so, may leave the room now
because in three more lines, the double doors will be locked--

the door to Beginning
and the door to End.
the star-crossed stars will line up in uneasy alignment.

(it's difficult as hell to keep to
three line
stanzas.)

as moments of clarity in a contemporary milieu
with its sickening social model
are emptied of spirit,

would that a poem could provide a revelation
of the finitude of our lives;
the fragility of all that we hold dear, thereby helping us to treasure this treasure.

this morning, the wind foretold a hesitant rain
whispering to the wet-behind-the-ears leaves
across the chasm of late spring.

but as i was saying: you never step in the same love twice.
Or do you? when this poem looks behind its back,
maple leaves sway as if

accidentally moved by a ripple
from an unforgotten romance, sneezing.
let others stand with their backs to the wind.

let others whack the unneeded words from this poem.
i am the poet with nothing to say
and too many ways to say it

summer was a fierce, curving green
outside the french doors.  i bow my head
in a kind of melancholy
that can only be described
as autumnal

a feeling between violence
and sympathy, an ever-growing metaphor
the shady leaves are in pain, writing shadows
of lyrical poetry
on the grass,
like a memory from the seventeenth century

a butterfly closes its wings
in a half-asleep dream
in the embrace of yellow coreopsis

the trees nod
with gestures of wisdom, their hands
gnarled with age,
their eyes gazing toward a school of floating clouds
swimming through a blue haze toward nothingness

a pale shadow leans across the savage green
then vanishes in the wind
my hands lean together against the rail
like two close friends sharing a secret

once  i was precocious as
a twenty-first century peach
sprouted from a homesick seed--

i hope one day i will have an awakened soul
living in a comfortable love
that transcends seasons and distances

i never thought that i was beautiful
until my husband said so: "gorgeous, gorgeous"--
(those were the first words he said
when he saw me naked.)
i felt loved...

it is quiet, more peaceful
when one is not admired
and the spirit lies listless and tame
like discarded petals
found the next day on the ground...

i lived like that once, like the lost
aging of the same empty sky.
now each day, the sun rises
lonely as a king
armed with many subtleties and rumors
of events past or still approaching

and no one says i'm beautiful.
the mirror is melancholy and distracted,
swamped by the worries and practicalities
of day to day existence as leaves shed
their shadows on the ground