there are no gardens here    hidden
behind high walls    no bricks for a new city
only the cry of a lost gondolier

but we can ride a blue horse to the sea
find a new way of dancing    a new song
to wash our feet in   we can wear a lei of stars
and hear a voice   apart from ourselves

crying change      come down to me
everything has failed us but our
flesh        and even that has tried
but there's still a path to our true bodies

let us find a world
we can reach in one black streak of light
come down my love      to where i have
already fallen
it isn't far     you're almost there

where dreams are a rush of ghostwings
a filament of moon
pouring on the bed

on the day you were born
it was raining. there was
no snow anywhere, there
by the sea

from that day
until the day you died
you loved the ocean
and the rain

i have kept these memories
in a box of salt water
where shadows of light
rock peacefully

inside the box there are
shells in every imaginable color
on the white cliffs
there are angels watching over you--

even though i usually don't exactly
believe in angels,
i see them in this box
writing the record of your life

and it's much longer
than your actual time on earth
there are patterns of light
caught in a shifting mist

the sea was here before we came
and will be here
long after we are gone
there are reflections

where your ashes
add color to the waves
in my box of salt water
when i look up at the stars

i believe i see the one you made

poetry (or is it love?) is a means of transportation--
it begins in the middle and ends in the middle because
it's all about the ride, (unlike a racer
who wants to win at any cost)

what's left is a track that fables
are written on, (also known as memories)
half moonlight, half black ink, half wishful thinking.
(chinese mathematics)

love doesn't even have a road
to collect the snow--and it's that cosmic cold
that holds a galaxy in,
weightless, huddled in the window,
then wandering off into a darkness

flooding with gold. what sounds like gunfire
is just more love tossing up its light
or a racer crossing the finish line.
it's all one long (or short) path,
depending on your point of view.

the gods are seated in the stands, amazed.
sometimes they rise up cheering.
it's how they come to know themselves--nitro,
thrust, speed, words, heart, hands;
star-tracks and love
that races across our hearts

without a sound

you are not here to read
this chronicle of my nights. daytime hides
the stars, even the ones that took
forever to arrive. between dreams
and the unknown, i live my life
and that's where i love you.

tonight i will be separating insomnia
from sleep.. sleepless because your departures
are always too abrupt, no matter how long
they take. (but real sight, they say, begins
in the dark and yesterday has already
gone ahead to meet you because
time is relative
to arrival and departure.)

do you love me a little? you ask.
and if i were a poet i would answer:
come away from the window and lie down
in my arms.  there's no darkness
that is not already in you.  one day, you
will lie down and all your guard
will be surrendered
to my heart's lamp on a page pressed
by winter's hand in the shadow
of an attainable heaven

it's not a question of finding new words
for a poem, it's a question of shuffling
and dealing the same old words
in some other order.  words like :
desire, bowl, transient,
belief, intrinsic, dust,
chaos, shadows, walk,
dreaming, today, tomorrow,
trees, flowers,
pond, snow, sun,
ascendancy, deceive, act,
faith, tomorrow.

shuffle, cut, deal :

dusk, demands, soft, edges, like,
charcoal, drawings, smudged, with, the, thumb,
when, night, comes, there, are,
dark, and, light, blotches,of, ink,spilled,
on, a, silver, speckled, paper

discard several unwanted words :

descending, into,
hard, core, silence, beneath,
the, lowering, heavens;
crumbling, bricks,and,
ashen, gray, lawns,
are, as, desiccated, as, your, devotion,
in, times, of, trial

draw  replacements :

when, your, return, touches, and,
embraces, my, spirit's, seven, rainbows,
with,sounds,unknown, in, any, language,
i, shall, spread, wide, my, wings, and, fly, to, you,

play your hand :

no matter the past
after an ending that ends so unendingly,
can we not begin again
what we have so unendingly begun?
i do not know where--or if--
you have gone, don't know
if this is a reverse
alchemy, a mockery
of what was once so golden.
but i know that today's bowl of snow
will become a freshet trickling
into a summer pond
of tomorrow, overflowing
with the intrinsic belief in
a chaos of reflections
that are dreaming
of trees and flowers
and the ascendancy of the sun.

in an act of faith, we will walk out
from today's shadows and dust.

no transient despair
will ever again
deceive us

sometimes i remember
the components of intimacy.  the
small noises of another body in bed
beneath a pressing darkness of forever
where stars are like visionary images

sometimes i remember
not sleepwalking, but dream-dancing
along the craters of the moon,
it became the only escape from a belittling marriage.

the sun is built to endure, but it is all by itself out there,
always burning with an incurable loneliness.
to the bipolar soul, the only feelings worth having
are beatified ecstasy and mortal despair.

i have not achieved the tao-- too much of this;
too little of that. i tried to restrain myself.
things don't grow if you pull their roots,
i'd say to myself and i'd put down the phone.

i can't help my endless ache for love.
so every day i hurry to my mailbox
to see if you have written to me--
Nothing there.

the invisible often casts more light on things.

i keep so many small things in my heart :
your sighs mingled with your breathing,
sap running in the trees
new branches growing
in their own direction,
you leaving without
ever looking back.

these things should be light,
almost weightless.

but no matter how high i jump,

i still have to obey the laws of gravity

" you must focus every word as if you are watching a lonely sail out at sea." ~ Yu Feng

in the first verse of this poem, a moon is reflected
on the snow's silver printing plate--
a mirror's inverted image
of an island inside the heart
where a living ghost has been taken
out of time.

but in the next paragraph, the dawn shines
its sword of light up from the horizon
and you can see the snow-white clouds
ripping apart, hurled with brutal force
against your window.

midway through the verse,  every
day is a rock that makes you have to sit down,
and the page of your life is blank in all directions.
you wonder if the end of the end is not the end,
because the end itself is without end;

or if the poem is actually ghost-talk--
the forgotten,the forgetter; the dead, the killer,
the words used as a mask, and the
one whose face does not remain
when the mask is thrown down.

the poem writes you into a space
outside the book,  and it reads
the history buried in your body,
it is where, by wishful thinking,
you can cleanse every personal event
into something universal.

in the next to last verse,
cold pines are trembling in the wind
as the huge feet of the clouds
stomp across a shattered sky.

so i will write a warm, green verse
where you have tossed your hat
on a bench and it stays there forever.
you kiss me, and the kiss never ends.
in the last line, you love me there,
and there you go on loving me forever

what can i possibly write about? haven't i already
written every computation and permutation
in the last ten thousand poems? when has it ever
brought back lost love or retrieved a departed heart?

morning holds up its brimming chalice full of
iridescent light-- inside i come upon a vision of
my own disconcerting face, as if in a painting
by Hieronymus Bosch.

i only want the aplomb of a bright blue sky
and a bedazzlement of sunlight!

love, affection...?
a stunning but temporary delirium, a kiss
on the upturned mouth of all my words
that stumbled along the edges
of a dirt embankment, pretending greatly,
believing whole-heartedly, even as they whinged
my disbelief. now what? what comes next?

a penitential fall into a ring of fire
as night ignites
all my daytime fears?

all these years
SIMPLY AIN'T ENOUGH,
so do not leave me--

me, the Anonymous Caller
who knocked on your bolted door
and stammered after your un-ownable smile.

sotto voce:
did i say "un-ownable" or "unknowable"?

pay attention.

do you remember when it seemed
that the whole world was closed
on winter days and nothing good would ever
come of politics or snow? do you remember
when waking every day was guesswork
and we were often like children?
do you know i named a path through the bamboo grove
after you?

and do you remember
when we strolled that path in the bamboo grove
and birds sang our hearts away?

taking life as it comes is the extraordinary task.
any voyage i take today, i take alone, sailing
an internal sea.  so dim,  so far, those lights i once saw
on the Yangtze, farther still the stars in your
stumbling sky.

but really, this year, it is my sky that is stumbling
on ahead trying to wait up, but unable to maintain
a midnight vigil past a fleeting dream.  even if there were
a steam whistle, i would be unable to hear it
through the sea-billows of all the things you said
that still linger in my right ear.

shadows have spread across my face since that last
day you saw me. now i am waiting for the march wind.
it's not that i want to repossess your heart or soul, not
that i need to grasp you at the edge of that stone bridge
where our hands touched and stars sprayed us with light..

i only need to launch my soul's quest there like a kite
that will give its tail a shake and keep
on climbing higher and higher,
a question mark in the sky

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