Sleep, Sleep

Sleep, sleep
Slip past the speckled sidewalk, the curb
the sunlight sprinkled over
trees and into shadows
Come into shadows, gray
and black and blue, come
into shadowed seas whipped
white whipped into froth
Where you and I are not
so different, you and I
are frothed obsidian, not
so different floating in the
fade. Sleep, sleep
and cover your face,
smooth your face, wrap
ourselves in seaweed to
cover our face, you and I
are not so different in
the seaweed sleep.

Untitled

I grow tired of Summer's
advances: heat and color,
flexing muscles
and thrusting hips. Give me
Autumn-- the musky sex
of season change,
wood-smoke and leaves just
starting to rot, bitter apple
bark in your hair, a lover
that slides a slick pumpkin
tongue between your teeth
and folds a sweater around
your shoulders. Give me
brisk dusk walks in
the near-chill, the damp
sponge of the earth,
absurdly blue sky.
Fields of leggy thin women
with hair like silk, all
bending together at a
turn in the breeze.

A Dream of Owls

It’s got cheap steak, so we steer
The ancient smelly Ford
Six and a quarter miles East
Through pea-sized hail
And slow when we spot it
Not hard to find, GIRLS
GIRLS GIRLS
In flickering orange neon.

Center-stage, spot-lit, writhing,
Sinuous as a cat with faint
C-section scarring, glimpse
Of a miniscule flag tattoo,
Left inner wrist—Polish. Czech?

I can’t look her in the eye. I am red,
Flustered, digesting rubbery meat;
Embarrassed to be transfixed, (though
I’d like to be, she moves like night)
And you lean over and spill hot wet
Reassurance in my ear: “You can watch.
That’s why she’s up there.”

Her breasts lift up and out, point
Like owl eyes when she raises her arms.
She aims a pout at us, winks
Upside-down clacks slick heels together--
Long brown thighs, too tan for Spring
Wrapped like ribbons round a may-pole.

A sudden swish, hands-free
Look-at-me-Ma
And she swoops floor-ward, spinning.
Bottle-blonde curls caress
The grimy pole-base. Her shoes glitter.
The crowd whoops
Sipping tepid beer.

Late in bed I breathe your sleep
Smell, flannel-gray and quiet
And dream of owls
Staring, spreading deep wings
Golden in the half-light
To spiral down on unsuspecting mice.

Bean

In time-lapse,
our flowering bean pokes
narrow helicopter blades
through the earth
and looms suddenly
lush and curling overhead.

We watch her
budding love affair
with the sun, sped up, trembling.
She opens
like a smile when he
touches her, unfurls her fruit,

and shrivels
when he pulls away.
Days rotate in seconds. We
are amazed
that such a simple
dance could keep the world turning.

Crook of the Arm

To ache is to remember our old home,
how ocean air would fleck the cliffs with foam
and whip the cove into a frenzied fit.
This town, of all the places to forget
forever haunts. I brush my teeth with sand.
I comb the seaweed through my hair and find
the carcasses of horseshoe crabs in my bed.
The shallow pools of sucking mud turned red
from years of rusted fishing hooks. The din
of gulls that swoop to grab your hot dog bun.
Cicadas keep the dogs awake at night.
Raccoons tip over garbage cans and fight
for scraps. The house next door holds someone new
each summer. Vines climb over the canoe
that we used only when the moon was full.
(My mother used to joke that she could pull
that pearl from Heaven with our tiny boat
by navigating her own secret route:
the bridge of light that stretched from shore to sea.
It would be hers if only she could reach.)
To feel is to remember how the grass
would squeak a dying note when firmly grasped.
It's mine, this town of green-head flies and bikes--
how could I possibly forget when nights
in dreaming I return to touch our porch?
Caress the graying shingles and the door
that's always open, weathered, letting through
the low-tide stench? The scent of evening dew?
Beneath our roof I move, nostalgic lust,
to climb stairs aging, warped with feathered dust
and from the salt-swelled window of her room,
I watch my mother wade out to the moon.

Your Absence

It's a quiet
that squeezes into cracks
and holes in our conversation,
gooey, smothering. We nod
when your name comes up, explain
to others, shrug, smile a little. The gap
that follows eats us whole.

Energy powers motion. We keep busy
and talk often, press ourselves together
at night, forget.
They call it a defense mechanism
but we like to think of it as
staying sane.
You swim behind every man we encounter,
pieces of you lodged in their faces
like bits of light. We fight the urge to
shake them
touch their shoulders
and remind ourselves.

Found some old poetry...

Don't you love going through old papers? I recently found a series of my poems from two or three years ago that I thought I might share here.

Next few following posts are of that old stock.