Half moon rising in the night
Its dark side does not shine
Sometimes I feel just half a man
Who cannot make you mine.
The half that glows in yellow light
Reflected from the sun
Is like my face alighted by
The gaze of my loved one.
The half that hangs so dark and still
Against the starry field
Is like my tortured soul whose pain
In absence is revealed.
I lost a gold ring
one rare snowy day
when we lived on Merriwood Ct.
It must have slipped
off my cold right ring finger
when I threw a snowball
and my slush-soaked mitten flew too.
The neighbor lady found it,
to our surprise, next spring in the lawn.
Love can be this way.
You can lose it
when you are tossing things,
when the world’s too cold.
You become accustomed
to its absence, stop feeling for it
with your thumb.
One day, it may turn up
where you least expect,
amid a scattering of dandelions
in the season’s warm rain.
Old love is like an old suit of clothes,
well-worn at the elbows and knees
from all the years of hard work and
from all the crawling. At one time,
perhaps, you could have said it was
comfortable, but now it’s just small
and sad — tight through the back
and arms, harder to move, harder
to breathe, you just have to suck in
your waist, hold your breath, and zip.
New love is like a new penny that
glints in the sun so you pick it up
for luck, shiny and bright, a perfect
circle with perfectly smooth edges,
and turn it over and over in your
pocket where no one else can see.
You have become a collector of
pretty things that catch the light,
a blackbird caching treasures.
Old suits are worn at weddings
and funerals — your funeral —
the black wool blend pressed crisp,
the creases sharp, the collar stiff
as a cadaver, everything neater
than when you were living.
They’ll say such a perfect match,
cut from the same cloth. No one,
not even the undertaker who
bathed and dressed you, will
notice the small copper disk
in your left breast pocket, resting
on your rock-still heart, a treasure
to take with you to the ground.
Like discovering water on the surface of the moon —
sometimes love finds you in the beautiful desolation
of a dark and empty heart. No river, no lake-
filled crater, no rain to streak the lunar sky, just
a meager film of dew laid down in endless night,
but gather up the spread-thin droplets on the freeze-
dried ancient sea — oh lonely sky-flung traveler —
wet your long-parched lips, slake your love-
foresaken thirst, and drink in, too, the light-
pulsed words that shine across space and time
like the bright and smiling face of the full moon
that casts its glow upon the hills and lakes,
coyotes and junkyard dogs, soldiers and sailors
and ships at sea, and lovers strolling hand in hand
on the tide-turned shores of a far-off watery world.
Away you glide across the surface
of this Northwoods lake at sundown,
your paddle strokes strong and sure
and natural as breathing;
the water,
pink and blue reflection of the sky,
closing seamlessly behind your kayak,
leaving no trace of your passing through
this warm and windless September day
fading to night.
This is what leaving
would look like; this it how it feels
to be left on shore.
They say the language of dolphins
obeys the Law of Brevity,
but no one knows if a side flip
signifies a desire or an order.
For me it would not matter,
your wish being my command.
Your clicks and whistles still resonate
to the tip of my dorsal fin,
and so I swim beside you,
rolling in unison without words,
following your every gesture
like a shadow along the sandy bottom
of our shallow sunny sea.
There is no other way
for I have no legs to walk
upon that strange forbidden grade
that rises from the world we know
unto the mysterious dry seascape
where the current of my life
could never flow. Into
water we are born, salty
as blood and tears,
and in the sea we live
and love and leave too soon,
obeying the Law of Brevity.
You beckon me deeper
as you know I long to follow
the gulls who swim the sky
with their wondrous fins outstretched
and call me with their piercing cries
from the unknowable place beyond.
She, archivist of the articulate verses of detail:
lyrics of Canadian songwriters, secret
smiles shared like stolen candies,
funny foreign phrases, flags flapping
topsy turvy prayers to the freshening wind.
He, interpreter of the lush contours of desire:
pearls of sweat adorning snow-white breasts
in the dry heavy heat of the sauna, young
pink flesh rolling in the new-fallen snow
that covered the whole dark sensual world.
Together, they made a sort of poetry:
wood smoke curling in the winter sky,
fragments sketched on frosty windows,
love letters traced star to star
across the brief impatient night.
I will drink nine cups of coffee at nine;
I will plant nine acorns in nine holes
on nine hills;
I will serve nine platters of nine cupcakes
with nine candles;
I will send nine letters to nine editors
on nine serious subjects;
I will tell nine friends nine secrets
in nine languages;
I will feed nine sardines to nine cats
with nine lives;
I will follow the nine commandments
of the god of 729 names;
I will pleasure my ninth lover nine times
at her nine erogenous zones;
I will compose nine songs of celebration
for the eight planets
and Pluto, the cartoon dog.
It was the day of falling apples.
The tree was heavy with fruit,
branches taut under the pull of
languorous weight. The morning
breathed thick tongued, dull
eyed, waking from a dream.
There came a sudden wind
that grabbed the tawny limbs,
slender as the blue veined wrists
of young maidens, and shook.
Down plopped apples,
one
two
five
a staccato fusillade,
hoofbeats of mare and stallion.
The man flinched at the first
fat raindrop. He had been
considering the apples, firm,
pale with a faint pink blush,
breasts, one in each hand,
weighing them in his mind.
He cleaved one apple, stem
to stern, to reveal its
five chambered heart, with
five seeds like hard brown tears,
one each for the four winds
and one for the lover who had
blown him away.
Coyote, wise old trickster
shuffling ‘cross the road
under an August moon,
you look a little shaggy,
a little grayer,
but you and I know
the best blueberry patches,
the way across the swale,
how to step light
over a thin crust of windpacked snow,
when to chase
and when to lay in wait.
The moon casts
reflected sunlight
on the old familiar trails,
as the summer night
gathers memories
of distant, bygone loves,
and traces a crooked path
upon my dark betrodden heart.
