I

Shall we open the books,
call the pictures to burn
paradise while the earth remains

dark as night;
quiet stream take these words
from my eyes to a dream.

I tried to leave but I couldn’t
move, like your smile
that lingers with the scent of lylac

counting out the scenes of a story
that fell apart as it moved along.
Our words misunderstand us but never really lie.
II

I plow the future for you.
I plant wisdom
deep below
the dirt of redemption and still
find you in the mirror
overhead.

I wait for you to become
the footsteps I hear
through the smoke and heat
that scorch dead earth;

black, waiting
for the rain
or an answer
when you sleep
beyond these walls
I can move through when I talk
to you in dreams,
quietly
before dawn, where your rhythm has no beat.

 

III

There are no palm trees here, only pines
growing over the foothills.
I too am growing here, each night
reclaiming a heritage that was lost

across lonely highways and nicotine days.
Watching the joyous winter come alive, sleet
like tiny pins of sand and my father
returning to the womb, crying
freedom and knowing mother is wisest
even as a maiden nurturing her bitch to heat.

 

IV

She took a book from the parlor
and asked me if I’d read;
she wrote things I never did in my dark.

Everything she felt had come up slowly
while I walked those walls, a soldier
for the defeated, too lonely
to think of getting out.
The gods of heaven come

and go, the seasons slip
into repeat;
the sun at noon
in a rain that’s as dark

as midnight. I move these streets
with eyes poison red,
lying in your forgotten kingdoms,
dying where we awoke.

For every seed she has grown another has died in it’s place.

 

V

Before I saw you, when
ever that was, you were looking
for me, across an empty field, a worn corner
on an abandoned farmhouse.

I still can’t quite place where
we met, unclear in the sunset.
Still I search for you, your firm gaze
beckoning me through the air,

pulling me, dragging my feet
and legs like a backhoe, leaving a deep rut
to your door.
Tired and sore
from removing that tight spiral
of earth, for an expressway with two lanes
going south. A sacred highway

across a dying pasture
revealing the gypsy jewels buried deep
below the surface;

quartz and Formica I take
for my eyes, to remember that crumbling
building standing alive .