back in december, when i heard
the word "snow", i thought : white, purity, beauty.
i don't need to tell you that in february
it isn't that way.

the wind peels a cold stinging powder
off the high dunes.  clouds
of driven snow moan and twirl
like restless ghosts.
my own skin feels like
a drift of old snow.

you know the old story-
if i could i would hold your hands
between my palms
we could spread some warmth.
but shadows lap across the sky;
somewhere, behind those clouds,
there is a frozen moon..

the heroic, their legs aching,
trudge on snowshoes
across the last meadow, then
go unnoticed into dark houses

i have always buried poverty
under dreams and poetry.
sometimes i think i can feel the air
from wings brushing my face
when i try to lift clear of all that was,

or all that was supposed to have been.

being alone is a wilderness experience
after ecstatic and terrified love
that was rendered in an overwrought,
over-ornamented frame.

one day everything changed.

dreams and poetry faltered
after finding something fleeting to love.
i wish i could have built strong bridges
over the deep and widening gaps
in the strength i so lovingly offered

to a dream in need
at the time

solitude used to be a sanctuary
but it isn’t any more.
(now i realize it wasn’t even solitude–

didn’t i lie when i said i had left
you behind?)  the walls these last
few days have been waves
fretting sheets of light.

shadows were black water, shallow
ink i couldn’t dive into.
i swam and swam against
a current i couldn’t find,
to the deep where even light drowns.

drowning is the one certainty
i have come to count on, leagues down
where sound thins out
and i tread the deep
in the ecstasy of absence–

missing you
is another way of loving you

as tender as dusk,
misty as trees encircling the lake;
like starlight flitting from place to place,
a dream arrives when i least expect it.
hope is a friend of dreams
and a sister of fantasy,
a shadow walking ahead,
restless as the wind
and shapeless as the pure light;
calm as a soaring hawk,
nimble as a butterfly,
a fantasy of dynamics,
a geometric obsession,
a poem with no lines,
a song with no rests,
and with more freedom than the wind.

hope will pluck out what’s deepest in your heart

but dreams will always have the last word

"The hour between night and dawn ... when most people die, sleep is deepest, nightmares are most real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their worst anguish, when ghosts and demons are most powerful. The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most babies are born"

i still dream of your eyes–
the eyes into which i never gazed
because they blinded me.
whatever flowers may be harbingers of spring
are withered in my heart. when you look at my shadow,
the beautiful woman there grows wrinkled.
the flooded landscape sweeps me away

your eyes–those oceans–
have drowned me.  when i wake up at dawn,
a bird flies from your eyes, taking in its beak
the image in my mirror
of you sleeping

my lips are your lips, the lips i cannot kiss.
the spirits you drink befuddle me;
when i sing, your voice sounds
sadder than an autumn twilight

i swallow the clouds in your mouth drifting
downward from the sky
and exhale your silence.  let my tongue speak
the words you whisper in your sleep,
the words i never hear

i am forever reaching for your hand, the hand
i fail to touch, seizing my shadow,
piercing the darkness of night.
when my hand closes into a fist, you
push me away into moonlight.
my palms stroke your bruises
in the night breeze,

causing me pain.  my fingers tremble,
breaking through your cry as your
hands reach inside my chest–
cutting short my pleading and
grasping my heart

if i were ever to love you,  it
would not be a decision

love isn't like that--
(while i was deciding,
it had already happened.)

i could say that love is a wondrous bird
that flies in no set course
no one knows where or when
it will alight
nor from whence it came
it doesn't fly here to seek a nest

meanwhile the tree never takes
a stance of refusal, its hands are lifted
to the skies--wanting something,
its branches willingly bear
this most beautiful moment

the tree might hope secretly
that the bird will lose its wings
and stay

its feathers glitter more than gold
with an existence more solid than the setting sun

i could say that

love is  your breath wafting through
my hair, your lips so close to my ear
while your heart beats
like a slight tremor
in the earth's core
my fragmented shadow watches from the wall,
until the night and love turn thick, like my hair

an hour of bliss germinates
in your smile
a candle's flame stains the darkness
warm yellow
like your life blazing away, but only now
with the sight of your final radiance,
your unfinished portrait--
all those strokes that
have gone awry,
painted over,
filling in your colours
with my hair's brushstrokes

at midnight, painting your entire body
with my lips, i will portray
the utter sweetness of life

the candlelight will sheath
our loneliness in soft petals..

Love is simple like this.

it is only
the sky with its storms and details
and vast distances
that sometimes delays its flight

poetry --
it feels like my home country,
where the river is a belt of brocade
with the rare scent
of a broken willow twig

my garden wilts in loneliness,
overrun by weeds
covered with dark shadows
and loitering snow

but here i touch the grass gently, lovingly,
as i would the curve of my lover's cheek
all my love and all my hope
i press into this page

where i can find spring
in any season.  here the sun
dispels the darkness
and brings awakening

in a poem it can be forever spring

even at the height of time,
there was always
an emptiness inside me.the day that i knew
that i loved you,
i felt a flicker of sadness
for the flowering
i knew always comes full, then fades..

and on that night,
the stars slept
in a blue-black darkness.

there was no moon to light the path
that you and i would take, spiraling
in slow circles--
coming closer to each other,
then going farther away.

(progression is always in spirals
and no one can return
to a pure beginning.)

one morning
i stood before
the injustices of love,
a hole burning in my heart,
holding the maps
that flowered freely in my hand
in the late afternoon light
when i wished i could be there with you.

silences became longer
like a tunnel of snow
the wind whistles through.
(as long as we had words,
we were kept alive to one another.)

i never wanted
to have to watch you
trudge up that hill
leading away from me

as the sun went down
like an old man
silently crossing the street

i mull over  ways to reach you--
dismember your wounded memory,
hang it up outside your bedroom
like a spider?  Or on the wings of a stamp
that bears a picture of a butterfly,
deliver a parcel of love and caring
to your breakfast table?
your tightly closed window
gives no purchase to the little sandals
of a timid butterfly.

they say that the fluttering of butterfly wings
in the southern hemisphere can cause
a typhoon in a winter dream...if my heart
trembles like a lost butterfly brushing
the doors and windows of your heart

stirring a sweet fragrance from a day
before a wounded dawn, will you hear
again the chirping birds, singing insects,
and a conversation that continues for every
mile the wheels of my tires turn?

my unconditional love is fixed like a thumbtack
to the spot on the map where you reside
beyond the ocean of myth, where a necklace
of stars is spilling all its light, and a singing
voice is compressed into a single teardrop..

the day is too short and the nights are long
and the valley of death is never far away.
oh when will the pure lotus bloom?
we have both in our own ways lived our lives
to try to make up for all the cruelty of the world,
but under the clear sky where butterflies hover
i sometimes wonder

if the way of the sages
has truly ever once been practiced in this world

within the confines of the soul,
all my elapsing gestures, transmigrate
into a silver bowl
language brimming over like snow
and that snow in the bowl
is language, is love,
is fearless choosing.

i said that i was born going away,
but the truth is, i was born
being left behind.  a teardrop falls
on the poem that i am writing,
i don't at once brush it away.  it spreads
on this measured line of indelible feeling,
falls on a poem by this poet far away
from your world, or any world,

whose most sophisticated wish is to walk
under a virtual tree with you,
recite poetry, carefully brush imaginary lint
from your lapel, and touch your hand
in a cold and desolate century. i remember
a small alley from childhood, leading to that
sea deep in my heart, a memory shining like
sunlight, so like a good poem, riding the wind,

flying over the sea and up the years,
to lodge inside my keyboard. i am trying to write
that naive and innocent poem,  that pure poem,
but my heart's not in it any more, not today
not any day, seeing that i must save humanity
from the excesses of my soul.  but a butterfly
lifts up from my page and tells me that i am translating,
only translating, standing on the deck of a boat

approaching towering waves, avoiding pirates,
and having to bear the sweat and tears
of a thousand poets before me.  better to be here,
than going to the supermarket, having to hear gossip
about the love affairs of other lives, better than dancing
at helsinki, under those measuring gazes, not knowing
which arrow is tipped with poison...

i have been standing
in the shade of a small tree for a long time,
watching love's last little remains--warm ashes--
rubbed on the virtual paper you've mailed to me.
please, let's try to make it to spring... the books
in my bookcase will firmly bite their lower lips,
as i endeavor to learn nothing new, because no death
was ever this depressing a departure.  but they say,

(and i will try to believe) that when fervent hope and trust
burn out, the real dark falls; and the soul's leaves
and branches begin to shine.  at this moment, in spite
of your doubts, i sense you, always close at hand;
and sometimes darkness is life's best compensation
ultimately, my stories are but a voice in exile
always emerging from behind, trying to catch up to you,
trying to say, in some obtuse way, by giving you all of myself
i love you.