behind the nursing home,
starlight and thin mist
deepen the mystery

while headlights
hollow out bright cones
in the darkness
or wander off into space.

there are many places
you can look for loneliness–
at a drinking table
or between the lights of a bridge
and their shimmering reflections in water

or below an unfastened belt
or in the pain splitting a heart
or in a shopping cart of canned peaches,
turnips, and whiskey
in slips and atmospherics
scavenging on a bluff

or in wishes worn smooth
like a self winding clock
which even after losing its hands
keeps ticking
but shows no hour

or in your grandmother’s cane,
your neighbor’s rosary,
ashtrays and extinguished candles,
a small exile with a bed in its recesses

or in words spoken to a
merciless distance

or vision that has detached itself
and is
blind to the light

i could swear your shadow is sitting
on the balcony whereas just last night
i saw it lying in a casket of light
and last week it galloped along the
side of the road clippity clopping
like fat fingers drumming a table.

resembling a drunken bee, your shadow
stumbled to my outstretched hand.
sotto voce: apropos of nothing–
did you know that in the nineteenth century
sociopaths were called “moral imbeciles”?
encircled by thorns, your shadow, like the wild rose,
is trying to bloom in the wrong season.

when it rains, either it’s not enough to soak
the earth or it’s enough for your shadow
to think about building an ark.
standing on the other side
of the french door, it looks at me
at once feeling embarrassed and disgusted
that it is unable to talk…

when did your shadow lose its head?
when did it take its place at my table
gilded in gold? when did it talk to the wrong
stranger and lose its carefully constructed partitions?
your shadow tours its compartments, reading
the posters that tell your story :  what began
with faith ends in folly,

what seemed like a blessing conjured a curse.
choices are a history already written,
spiraling out of control.   no amount of
love can save it, no amount of wishing
can stop it.  your shadow rocks back and forth
with its finger in its eye

like an imbecile

unaccustomed sunlight,  flutter
of a stray snowflake wavering in the cold ...

my first house was built on shadows,
the second was built on the day's last breath.

darkness resided in the hand-dug well,
a cylinder of green coolness

and rain scampered on the sheet-metal roof
telling stories my children loved to hear.

my third house was built on an oriole's last moment
of daydreams. my reflection celebrated loneliness;

beauty was the sadness of impermanence
barely concealed by the dying light.

among the trees that rustle through
the night's saltiness,

there are three languages: sound, smell,
and forgetfulness.

all of my houses have been makeshift rooms
of fleeting dreams

lost among footsteps engraved on dust.
i have followed a dream that has eluded me

on a road winding through
a patch of globe thistles

severing the wind to pieces

love is an image
of mountain ranges encircled by clouds
on shifting water.
drifting and silent, evening mist far
from the foothills and the woods' edge
slowly and tidelike drowns this wasted sky.
my solitary shadow faces a dark road
like a ship without a compass
lost in the fury of the sea.

courage of the soul is the secret
to a life of dignity.
the thick fog lifts to the steadfast light
of the curved, jade-like moon
peeping through the clouds' openings.
every day i have to believe
that there is some beauty
behind the gauze curtain of tomorrow;

the azure sky, the moonlight--
these are what sustain
a mountain pilgrim

the balcony has fallen asleep
under snow, tired of a small world
that is so big, there is no understanding it.
a poet once said that spring has rotted--
that it has become a frozen heap of compost
buried under winter.

the wind chime is stiff and still. music has
drifted away like light snow on a small wind.
i do not understand how other people love--
fickle as an early spring night--
whereas my love has all the inexorability
of winter.  i know that somewhere,
underneath the silent snow,

there are" leaping fish and flying birds"
and silence tiptoeing along a sleeping balcony.
but if you listen with all your late nights, you can hear
love dying young everywhere
for reasons winter cannot fathom.
like an inland child's first glimpse of the ocean:

it's too much.

i don't understand.

branches like glass
lift their arms to the light.
the sun comes on tiptoe
over the icy threshold.
tongues of frost
are licking the windowpane

you and i,
our union
is as perfect as the earth.
together we have created a thousand miles
of hills and valleys, rivers and plains
which now keep us apart.

but when summer comes,
i will turn my face toward you
like a dew-drenched rose
at sunset on a clearing day
and let the tears dry

in the meantime, i am sending you
this winter poem
if you don't understand the meaning,
it doesn't matter--
you can use your fingers
to touch the screen gently
like a doctor feeling for his patient's pulse.
perhaps you can tell
that they throb
to the rhythm of your heart

you and i,
we are two branches like glass
and from the distance that lies between us
we can measure
how hard the wind blows,
how high the tide rises,
how cold are the ice and snow
how deep is the longing for love

i want to exit this tomb of a room
and walk where the sheep of light
graze on the high meadow of the mountain
a lamp,  a candle, a star here and there
remind me of an old desire
that lurks in the deep well of my heart
a reflection
refusing to vanish
the wind's hooves gallop behind me
faster and more desperate than time
like a ray of light
on a layer of cooled volcanic rock
i remember love

tell me how to kick the memory
of passion's hunger like a stone
into tomorrow's empty stomach
how to pile up all the days
of soured milk
into a crumbling monument
or a tombstone
teach me how to arrange
my poems like ants, transporting food
to eternity--old grains of rice
nourishing the dried gully
of the soul

i miss the ideals of yesterday
that vista of dark waves
looming like crestfallen, resentful years
don't say that tragic idealism is a waterfowl
flying toward the edge of the ages
yet unable to find a tree
on which to perch
allow me to remember love
and the scent of a man
his hair a swath of night
in the starlight;
allow me to remember
a dream in my arms

let me fall down
outside tomorrow's door
i don't want to enter
that zone of barrenness
that arch of despair
i don't want to enter
even if my short-lived dream
is only a grey dove
taking off in the lilac dusk of time
like a pair of startled eyes
only you
may be able to follow
the twists and turns of my soul

did i ever tell you?  once
i stood at the gates of heaven
but i stepped back
and away--

it was not my time to enter.
(not talking about death here,
talking about love
and its hellish consequences.)

i just dreamed those lines.

talking about the queue, the long 
line to heaven, the doorman,
the stamp you get on your hand
so you can get back in,

in case your earthly life is resuscitated--
forget it.  DNR! and if you revive me anyway, i am
not going back to that joyless, misogynistic place.

today it is utterly like spring.  sap is running,
snow has turned to mud, and the media's fancy
has turned once more to prostitution.
Lord, kindly own what you have done.
there is no way, no way
your mother would have let her house
become such a mess

where was i?
i was talking about love and how real love,
love like a pitch black room in which
there is one magic candle;
love where the innocent heart-true lover
is not the one who falls through a great
collage of dying stars;

love, where the past is held aloft, briefly
like leaves; where there are no stagnating promises
and the very first agenda is not to end it
and to leave....

Love.  the only thing in all of life
that is not a state of altered consciousness

some nights are dream-ravaged,
a fold in time, an island floating
on the planet's edge about to fall off
without a trace,

but each day my journey starts
in the green raiment of a brooding hill.
it starts with faith, whistling up the wind
across a deciduous dark, and in my window

there is a summons to unreachable light.
wildflowers tease, then plead to be alone
among the shadows, waiting
for a warmer solstice

and specks of small hopes are sparkles
on a jade sea, bright beings in a dreamful life,
a life in which i am what i seek,
a dream in which even without the sun,

i am sun-blessed

i won't write about the arrival
of the sun, grinning with teeth
that are crimson from savaging the night.
never mind the clouds' conversation,
the snow reflecting pink diamonds,
the black, skeletal thinking
of winter's brittle trees.

it is several years now since i felt
the devastation of love--its passionate light;
its fetal aftermath.  they have
a vividness reserved for dreams;
the tragi-comedy of a shakespeare play.
but neither shall i write more about the seas,
salt, or sun;

no tree crotches, fat hobos;
no Lotharios.
i will keep to a grayscale montage,
moonbeams dangling from a magical sky,
a tired river abandoning its flailing arms
of shallow water to a white tropical sun.
never mind the lingering horde of dreams,
those bright colors of a fable that lingers on--
i renounce them.

i won't write poetry of love