Only those left holding loss
can know
the void. This would have been
her birthday.
Some days have celebration
at the center.
I’ve forgotten how to cry,
but not
to feel a mother’s emptiness
where once
the child held residence.
The sky
hangs low, its grayness tribute,
offering
its shawl, granting the climate
I share
with those who know.

Not every moment’s shift of sunlight
on the floor,
but how it cheats the clock each day
in the fraction
of its change. Old reliable has moves
no one
can alter. I roam these rooms or sit,
run water
in the tub, drink tea and read a book,
speak with
you and listen, our words approximate
though
understood. I cannot bring a decent
dignity
to everyone or end the killings
bleeding
our enlightenment, but in the transit
of the sun,
I’m given choice within the body’s rules.

Words flourish day or night.
You speak to me at the edge of sleep.
Does the white cyclamen,
patient at the window, listen
to the coleus, its neighbor, as the red-green
leaves unwind at dusk?
As your voice nurtures me,
the plants have grounds to breakfast
on each other’s euphony.

From the other room, the door half open,
a ping-pong of voices from the TV.

This room, with its swirling chairs,
clouded light, demanded more than its chill.

No one was expected, except the dream
suggested a visit from her surgeon.

It rose unbidden, the pressure,
the anxiety of following the recipe.

The kitchen, once her assignment,
became his province as the hour-bird sang.

He paid homage to her aging back,
his eyes reflected in the painting’s glass.

The unlit candle in its winding stick,
reliably present, brought her to him.

A turn of his lips, soft flesh at the nape
opened the yes! oh, yes! still pulsing.

From all he overheard he built a city,
>>>>>>> thin-wired words
>>>>>> >walking on
>>>>>> >insubstantial legs.
Gray buildings with blank faces, no windows,
>>>>>>>stare into the sun’s
>>>>>>>corona, waiting
>>>>>>>for a savior moon.
He wanders the alleyways looking for
>>>>>>>invisible people.
>>>>>>>A woman, soft
>>>>>>>in her shadow,
appears. Yes, he thought, we all live
>>>>>>>in our uneasy
>>>>>>>skins, each lit
>>>>>>>by small grace,
a reach to widen the walls. A longing
>>>>>>>persists, cutting
>>>>>>>the stifling air,
>>>>>>>a space for
what had yet to be imagined. A walking toward.

Morning chill,
triangles of yellow
on the rug, shifting

there beyond the chair, placed
just so, closing the shape of light
in this mating dance of earth

and sun. Perfection carries
the curse of relativity. Wonder at
the absolute, as in such beauty

hiding: Jungle-cautious bird
of paradise, fully in his feathers,
blue on black, a fatal iridescence,

drawing tribal man, his only predator,
to slaughter for his mimic rites.
How the bird displays!

A fanning spread of filmy blue,
an undulating dance, a courting,
irresistible, even as the female

circles, eyeing for selection’s sake.
A moment grounded, then soaring,
holy, above the reach of arrows’ kill.

A voice, able to burrow through
the barricade of snow, remains
unchanged.
She speaks of
kneeling then.
Our heroes holier
than a flotilla of angels as we wait
to ripen, our skin eager to be touched.
This late
she looks for
a memory,
the link obedient
to the blondness of bright mornings.
We walk again those pavement hills,
the school
hard-pressed
into a moment
of old bones.
Days have swallowed more than their cups
can hold. Tomorrow leans, its lace cap
slightly askew.

The pea-green boat hits the rocks.
No one has the strength of oars
to pull against the drowning current.

In the last room along the dark hall,
the day melts, as her hunger rises
further, her stomach filled

with soup, chicken on the wing. She longs
for the itch she once could scratch,
questions concocted, leading to complications,

Pushkin at the window, a minor crisis
or the smell of Obsession after-shave.
Russia had given her a dacha of expectation,

but the floorboards grew wet, collapsed.
More than honey or lots of money
required to best the cunning tides.

UP FROM THE DARK

In among
the morning
boxes,
crispies,
squares
and rounds,
a presence
mingles
with the
long night
visitations,
fresh milk
in the bowl.

Does the delivered soup taste arch-conservative?
Her late husband’s colleague’s wife simmered
a liberal cache of vegetables and beef to entice.
At the table we ate in a flurry of left-winged feathers,
without a hint that hands had stirred the pot with
chilled Alaskan rhetoric. And a further astonishment:
no indigestion! Even her Chihuahua licked the last,
Betty, so named for some barely apparent reason.