love poetry or something like it

analogy

your words are like rose petals
poured into my cupped palm:
fragrant at first but
with the cooling, fading of your
breath they are blown
through the cracks in my fingers and
swept into corners where
they grow dry, brittle;
meaningless.

could have been

lying belly-down on the wet green grass,

building fences

and reflecting on love;

at peace with you,

with me, for once;

but

i got short-strawed by fate

or maybe just my own timidity

too many verses and not enough

words,

looks, touches,

too careful avoidance

of what might be,

should have been?

too many shrugs

or just too much

imagination,

mistranslations of

flame

now ash,

moot,

silent, mute

maybes become

just more shouldered what-ifs

since i still don’t speak

and it’s already almost may.

the meaning of mancare

behind low shrubbery
in front of a church
at the center of nothing
we sat
drinking wine made from grape skin
out of little plastic cups,
and you showed me your hands,
empty.

*mancare, italian; “to lack; to be lacking; to be missed”

Love in four dimensions

A line
(or a pair of lines,
parallel),
an extravagance
in a land of relativity
where space and time
make up one word
and the universe
expands forever.
Nevertheless
you and I
travel the same paths,
the same velocity,
never touching
carbon to carbon,
but as an enantiomeric pair
always
separated by a centimeter
or a second
regardless
of how we might wish
to become ourselves
a continuum.

Summoning Skills

This is not a love poem.

Rather, breathing running paradox

a sapless fairy tale where

age and beauty don’t matter,

student and master

swap philosophies

overcast with longings sky-wide,

teach each other numbers and mysteries.

Savoring back-of-throat-knottiness,

hunter stalks prey

with steps, words, rhythms:

a war dance, a birth dance,

in a hot Georgia wind.

Pillow suffocates under pounding fists

as grinding croaking,

crying they demand

Come back, come back!

A study in metaphysics (revised)

Soft wax-molded hands, hearts,
impressionable play figures
grasping at irreducibles
and eternities,
of something-out-of-nothings:

They shut their eyes to the emptiness
and kindle invisible light;
darkness presses close and fleshy,
clinging like spiderwebs that won’t come off.

Desire becomes an ocean,
going on forever and ever horizon-less,
intangible, undefined,
a third invisible presence
orchestrating the impromptu dance.

She tries to hold it back,
countering ostension
with hypostasis,
peers out squinting at the line
of right and wrong.

He spurs on,
passion overriding:
decided, defined,
wax-hardened and clay-fired
a play figure no longer.

He breaks,
she caves,
they cleave one to the other,
make their tango personal,
cresting and receding
with the swell of their own rhythm.

Until at last
they cross the threshhold
into daylight,
slur lines and ontologies,
flames and sand and
sleep, breast to breast.

So much for philosophy.