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-

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.