lavender and gray

The story of gray and of lavender
is a product of their time together,
of arcing heights, yellows arranged, the lines
of ocean scold, and a bye-going sliver,
and they tell it, this story and their time,
to no one unwilling to hold its shine

still

The still air still carries
a heavy light, wing beats
heavier than the wait
of tires, these tires waiting
to resume their susurrous rush

who tends

who tends the dying sparrow(?)
not the sky
with the many
not the sky
so many to hold

I held distance and it was(.)
light not sad
for the many
not saddened
so many dying

unbecoming

It's become unbecoming,
this becoming
becoming less.

Into each life... no,
into (and after) each rain,
a little life.

Must the flies come?
They've come, falling
back into stories no one

needed to tell. The crawls of
unwelcome spiders
follow, and more

unbecoming.

risen

It's the sun that's risen. O, it rises again
and again. The you flares from it, again, and then
it rolls away rock eyes and it reveals to them
all that's alive in the face of non-living things.

medusa

This Medusa tree,
its viper's nest of limbs,
their tender green tongues
slipping free, freezes me.

space

Not only time's
relative. There's space,
and the zigzag paths
over dried needles.
I've found great distance
in a single step;
the plod that connects
me to young flowers.
Lightness'll come crossing
mouthy oceans; tongues
to teach me close. Mine's
an old, restless soul.

get

What's the get in letting
go, again? It's one when,
a daffodil moment.
That then, a yellow's warm's
warmest, before it goes,
spent. You hold it, the warmth
warmer yet for getting,
and let the yellow go
to where so many went.

unseasonable

Spring's put on a dampening chill
to tamp down hope before it spills
too soon. The sparrows still feel it,
as they wash in slants of splintering

rays. The gulls play to another,
duller air. They reel through steel gray
patches, and complain to a catch
of wind in their most unappealing

voices. I won't listen, or I'll miss them,
the season's softest lines. They bud
and bloom and rhyme with a spray of wishes
that crocus up to my mind betraying

the hand behind poems greater than mine

plastic

Two-hundred twenty twisted balloons bloomed
overnight around a horse-footed rider,
their stick-stems in imperfect headstone rows.
The anger I hold was always in danger,
inflated color losing to cooler airs.

winter wet

I smelled summer on an asphalt's winter
wet. The cardinal, hopping yet, knew it,
and lent me a tune made for faulty lyrics.
So I sang the earth, deep in its brown sleep,
a dream to green the glinting hints of her.

a day in the dream life

the dreams I dream can be not so dreamy
but life-y, filled with so much of my life's
dull parts, like the part I put in my hair
using a large comb. And I know not to grow
attached to life, and its dreams, what with the me
I dream and live not being me, except the parts
where holes holed into me, small oval windows
to the unreal of my dreamy reels, but I am.

given

There's a fragile smile to the miles-arc
its hooded eye plows in low, snowy clouds,
if you can slow the way you hold it in, golden
in a charcoal morning's up-side, til your down-
ward looking looks, less took than given

pill

This brittlest day tries dissolving
its pill sun into the painless gray.
A stubborn pill, it fizzes but stays.
I have learned. Holes cast faint shadows
and I've foolishly chased them across
the black, black mud to the shallows
of the bay. They wade but aren't staying.

bubble

I was out for an instant within a thin, loving bubble
that'd bubbled up from thick, tuneless music. As it rollicked
on chilled currents, I rolled back my rolled-back eyes
to drink the frothy white, and I saw. The tipped light
shades, their linen screens tipping more still, saluted
me, and the bubble passing by. Not meaning to
is still a sort of meaning, and out of sorts their tilting
served to illumine something, despite themselves. The night
spot-brightened by their gaze taught me nothing, but
I learned a bubble could grow and love to be within me

starfish

The cruelty's too perfect,
a starfish, its rays torn from it
until it leaks its life back
to the sea. I can't name it.
I can only trust its need.

patience

how patient, she asked once. how patient
could I be? more patient, I should
have said. more patient than the water,
deep all around, was. it was patient,
to catch what the stars wept down. and
as patient, I'll say. if she asks.
as patient, when she asks again,
as when, after a time we can't measure,
those same weeping stars welcomed me.

high white skies

From the perspective of high white skies, I have
no perspective, and the prospects are light
and limitless. I've tried, tried to tell the thinning air
I'm not really there. I'm not really me, or the me
it thinks it keeps from falling. I'm the air that fell
and brightened. It fell and what befell it was a face,
but only for an instant, until, until we switch places.

colors

The cardinals follow not to follow
but to call. Oh, they call after me
and they recall me to someone
with their song. When I'm done,
done chasing the whites that swirl
on top of black ice, where will I go?
The cardinals, they know it and they follow.
They know I'm their red, and the white
skittering snow, more than I am a who
or what watches it and listens
to them in this blue alone.

the eye of winter

I've spoken ten futures
into the eye of a winter's white-
blinded was. I'll speak one more.
I'll tell it, not blinking, what it will see
isn't what was, isn't what was lost,
but it is what we've learned. From it,
I'll take the chill. I've taken its biting
wind, to speak. And so, to speak
to it, I speak a name first. It assures
me. The eye of winter reassures me
there's a web hidden in its cataract
white, whiter still. Hidden in those
sticky crystals is a future too.
If you'll speak it to me.

dead of winter

The dead of winter, very alive, glide on. White hides
in the inside of the treads they don't leave. The sparrows've
fattened up, but I see no sign of food or love in the flattened
Styrofoam cup the sidewalk's smile has become.

the first poem

the first poem of the year isn't, it can't be a tree
or lovely. It is love's, and my love uses
its roots to see: all water's a soul drawn free;
the earth's our heart but muted; and the truth is
my god isn't a god who'd not come unbeckoned.
she comes in the swarms of becoming seconds.