The Nylons

There are strips in your stockings

where your skin shows through

startling in its hue.

The moon has crept beneath your eyes

all pearl and silence across your cheeks.

The heather swells delicate in your veins

as they run purple across your wrist.

The willow has woven itself

into your hair that weeps past your waist.

All nature has bent itself to your making

All earth lies sleeping

waiting for your waking.

Yet when you walk, all they wonder

is if you know about the tears in your stockings.

How foolish to judge a nymph by her nylons

like the wind by its weight

or the world by its waiting

or the heart by its loving.

Proper places

To rebuild the earth

to restore the glory of the world

to prophecy that beauty

shall debut again

is beyond me.

Let me announce the quiet

turning of spring to summer.

Let me stand as herald

to the place where cold water

comes up from the earth laughing.

I will be the louder voice,

the longer hymn,

of the already present song.

I will take up the full-hearted pen

the ream of paper

and act as historian and mapmaker

inscribing worlds as they were and are

but ask not of me the future.

Do not question me for truth

in it's deeper patterns.

I may tell you how it appears

but not how truth be

that too is beyond me

to track it in it's essence

and not merely it's effect.

Let me stand as herald and announce the world

but leave the judgement to a better Lord.

Exit wound

When the tide retreats the sand

lies in lonely lines

ridges like arms

that could not contain

the beloved.

When the sun sinks the trees

stretch sunken shadows

fragile like fingers

that have lost their grip

on sanctity.

When the summer fades the water

hardens into harsh hiding

frozen like feet

that cannot follow

the track.

When you leave the room, the world

disintegrates into despair

silenced like my heart

that hates to remember

being alone.

The Game

Kissing the corner of my mouth

weighs me down

tilts the sky

spins the sun haphazard

Galileo's marble on a slope.

I become a lost thing

the treasure in the field

the pearl in the palm

of the child

along with his cat's eye toy.

You force me from the circle

drawn in the sand

by the ruptured silence

of your smile against my skin.

Kiss the corner of my mouth

scoop me up into your hand

Win me the way you would

the marbles on the cement streets

crowing your victory

and I will slip into your pocket

content.

Cape Cod Suicide

The sand seems a strange place

to choose to die.

Strange to think of swimming in

to the shallows

scraping the soft grey skin

feeling the tide strain to pull you back

towards its black-blue embrace.

Pressing on

to the burning light, the heat,

the eternal sun.

The asthmatic gasping

the salty thrashing

and all five hundred pounds of grace

expended along the shoreline.

At night, Brody walks alone

into the sea.

Past him,

the dolphins swim

to strand themselves

upon the sand.

The Garden

Almost too heavy to bear

your white cheek on your white hand

draped like a willow wreath.

There is too much of weeping in the curve

of your neck as though it aches.

The summer sun is cruel to beat so

across your shoulder.

Winter's weight has not yet lifted from you

for all the full season's blooms.

Almost too much to bear

watching you from the doorway

sitting at the iron cross the flowers cannot soften.

But soon you stand

and shaking still reach out to take my hand.

It is almost too much

but summer will come at last.

Creator debt

When you die, he will die too.

They will place you both in a narrow coffin

packed too tight to bear

such cloesness for you two.

In the darkness you go first

and then him so close behind it is

almost not worth the diestinction.

You first- it is only fair

since you came first as well

and bore him along as on a leash

a long wet cord from which he issued

went forth into the world but always returned.

When you die he will die too

and it is hard not to hate you for it

for giving such life as is possible to love him

and the taking him silent in your crowded tomb.

Author mother be kind

and let him die alone

before you claim him set him free

and bury him on his own.