song of the silent

night June 17, 2006

falls and i fall prey to oceans of thought and thoughts of ocean,
you, me, light powdery sand separating and connecting our dark figures
ilumined partly by the moonlight.
you talk for a bit in your sing-song,
something about a woman and a guitar. where were you?
where was i? popsickle. licking the drippy blue,
the lime or green apple. someone lifts me up, up
to look at the fireworks. yawny sighs. pops of light. aching, straining, smiling.
you laugh. i smile. you see i faked and reach.
tumble and kiss, tumble and burn. sea over sea.
you have my attention, you have my soft hot breath
and the salty ocean. you have it all.
i got hours of slow blinking. i got my shoes and bare silent woods.
shelves of poetry. back. that look in my eye.
aching, straining, piling
the pillows, re-arranging, shifting and shaping the
geometry of night. i got a history
of thinking like this, thinking in waves
while the moon sets and you
you breathe sea salts
and sleep.

moonlight showers April 6, 2006

dance, girl.

breakfast isn’t for 9 hours,
and moonlight showers
rain on the backs of naked dancers.

mascara washes away

night after night
for the next 12 seasons,
as proclaimed by the morse
of tortoise shells
clinking from below…

dance, menina.
the slow toll of night sounds,
part toucan, part cloudy rumble.
the sun has bowed offstage –
starcircus will commence.

from barritonal skies
a moon chants,
a silver discus: the last athenian relic.
i wonder,
what will we leave behind?

red red wine, chopsticks,
hulas? huckleberries,
crystal jjingle earrings, spoons
or knives?
on a hill, one home draped in malignance?

let it be the neighbor’s
with a solitary tomb:
here lies one nation under god.

we’ll know not of it

dancing, as we will,
unto the night.

out with the bodies!! out with the souls!!

one ginger step outside your skirts –
naked fever,
give and take of night,

whose moonlight showers
rain on the backs of beautiful dancers.

thoughts on dusk March 27, 2006

i wish that you were here.
the weather
you would like. chilly with a dash of sun,
but step inside
and
my bed stretches before me
like a january beach.
the void
where i sometimes imagine dancing
our bodies
grows by night. rustic, the first strums of, guitar
would put us to sleep
without dreams
because we are in want of nothing.
save the desire to continue in this simple way
(with moonlight spilling through the window)

February 23, 2006

i could write
poems of this
cool jazz nature
for days
at a time.
rhyme
would not be necessary
or even welcome
but dispelled
at the front gate
back into
the cold rain.
color
however would
stride through
the open door
and have a
glass of wine,
dark red
especially.
though i’d not
discriminate vs.
blue
for all its
watery misgivings
or yellow
because yellow smiles.
but black
with all its
bruises
and bats
and
things of that
dark nature
can take a hike
though they will
kindly avoid
the amazon,
where green learns
how to walk.

lipstick February 21, 2006

Reader, how many poems
begin at the base of a long staircase, gazing skyward,
and climb, line by onomatopoetic line,
en painstaking route to the light
at the tippy top,
where they stop to peer over the chestnut rail
and pat themselves on the back,
wide smiles illumining their paradoxical faces?

I knew without a doubt
after tripping this afternoon
on the third step (barefoot, tack)
that I would never produce
such a poem, that my art –
bejeweled, with red lipstick
and measured, high-heeled step –
would snake down
and down and down, past midnight,
to the cold basement of the earth.

Lurking there
might be Shakespeare, alive and bespectacled,
two rims of fatigue clouding his tragic eyes,
feather quill in hand,

or perhaps Frost,
one eyebrow raised, bereft of company,
save a candle flickering –

hell, maybe Donne is down there,
heeding the toll of some distant bell and
blowing out Frost’s candle.

But if I had to guess,
myself not having been,
there lounges a man we’ve never heard of
strumming a guitar, blue jeans askew,
eyes necessarily closed,

the tail of his black lab wagging
at the sound of verse incarnate
galumphing down the steps,
a puff of cigarette smoke foreshadowing
her long, unkempt black hair.

this poem in strange dialect has no title except this and becomes thus stranger February 20, 2006

Take my suitcase, we’re goin out, out
to foreign lands, shapes of purple
and green with blue divide, a river
on the map. I hope you’ve got
your guitar somewhere in this mess,
cuz boy, there will be music, there will be dancin
where we’re goin, yeah we’re goin.
And I hear the spice’s not half-bad
where we’re headed, and not half-sad
to be headed.
Come, the hour’s now,
don’t bother with the lock,
come, let’s walk the walk.

strawberry sundays February 10, 2006

I think I’m gonna write a song
this morning – the flowers
made me think so.
And the exit signs on the highway,
counting down to
thirty-one, twenty-five, eighteen
bottles of beer or
dreams of blue, eyes
watching for a sign,
lookin for some treble.
You haven’t seen her, have you?
She likes to hide between the bushes
on strawberry Sundays,
but I walked all the rows
and found just this – two empty pails and a
note: Your sax is out of tune,
signed, Roxanne,
with a flourish on the R.
Well, I hoped it’d be a good day,
the sort of day that pulls everyone outside, the
Sun a kind of tug-boat. Now
I see it, and I don’t,
the clouds dancing as they do.