Monday, January 23, 2012

Truancy


If I stepped out while you were
talking but remained on my perch-
If in the midst of making love
the color of a particular kind of jade
called me, urged me(to look away)-

If everyone who walked on their toes
or wore chartreuse while riding a bike
or took down the sanctity like a big tent
distracted me from this moment
that has passed-

If for every classroom where I sat in the rear
and thought about the next thing
and wrote about the desire to play
or just did that
and counted them by fives-

If I missed your dark eyes improvising
because I was watching your mouth bake words
but the words were lost or eaten before I could taste them
because your eyes flagged me down and there
at each still point in this oscillation
I found myself-

If he tried his best to tell me everything
he wanted me to know and then he passed
and I had not gotten what I wanted
but finally stopped looking somewhere else-


Sunday, January 01, 2012

Melancholia and the Age of Varnish

The small car, the crash,
the back flip she did
on impact,
into the rear of a carraige
on a country road, where a
vague wave of red sadness
came over her
on that day in that year.

He pushed forward, more a follow through,
into water, dark, blue, without chill,
where he waited, shining, moonlit,
at the bottom of the lake.

He saw it as a problem to solve-
She saw nothing, just a feeling
of what happens.
Nothing in her life acted as a clue.

He lay in a deerbed of sea oats, hearing
the title of this poem in his head.
He walked along side her as she spoke
the words, "varnish a little coat of."

"Vanish was the new word," he thought,
at the bottom of the pond.  "Vanish
will be a wipe, an artificial moment
of doubt, the veneer on the next worry."

Down the path from the pond,
beyond the parked small car,
they lay together in a
small pine grove, listening
to trees trusting the wind.
In the distance great white
windmills articulated the
answer in sway that kept coming-
neither this way nor that-
just in arc.