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.