images
on shifting waters.  the meadow's walls
are whiter than they were yesterday.
i have held things in my mouth
that i cannot say, acts in my chest
that i cannot do.  and yet i am strangely content--

adrift in the realm of wonderment,
living in a blood that is all mine
in the color of spirits
floating backwards.

love isn't blind, but deaf.  and genies
who so generously grant wishes
vanish in an instant. but life is easy
when you know the art
of falling apart...

time is a bowling ball in a net-- i know this
because you told me.  so you still sleep
cradled in my body, your breathing
is still rhythmic, still half mine,  seventeen
breaths of my minute,

a gentle rocking.

winter is immense, a place in which i get lost
on my way to whatever comes next.
i simply can't be bitter; succumb to despair...

dogwoods will again open their hands,
azaleas will catch on fire,
sunset will paint the puddles gold.
i will acquire a passing knowledge of the stars,

uncoiled into understated passion, shaped by
a visionary who had everything wrong,

whose
beginnings concluded without warning

the white orchids in the window
and the delicate orchid-colored orchids
need to be re-potted, a snowy-day's project.
there must be something called original memory

where orchids bloomed in a pleasure cavern
carved in amber-colored amber
and a rock sat cross-legged
in a bullying swirl of hardened precipitation.

at the beginning of this century, i intended
to travel light, but things have a way
of accruing.  i have acquired, among other things,
a sole blue shadow, freshly aged and slightly stooped,

with the hunchback posture of the winged.
for a while,  i was married to a photograph.
i kept my vows, walked the long miles of waiting
until time took down my future
in one cold swallow.

nevertheless, i will finish this poem
with a happy ending
a sun
on which to hang
a hundred shades of endless sky