when all words fail

Avec -

2011-06-08T10:41:00.000-07:00

She is with us
because of nomenclature.

the odd way that we that we become
what we are called.

I had pondered “dovima”
or “paloma”
or “dove”
but none settled in her eyes,
or moved the mouth with comfort
in her steady soon to turn green
gaze.

And when she pressed her forehead to my chest,
with insistence,
with hind legs stretching,
and sighed

“Home
Beloved
At last”

I remembered sitting with you on the bench
waiting for the table
or waiting for a friend
and looking up at a sign.

“that would make a great name,”
I said.

And you took my hand.

And I think you agreed.

do you, timothy -

2011-06-05T17:30:00.000-07:00

at table forty one
in delfina’s,
you can see things both ways.

into the place people were clustered,
waiting,
for the permission to enter,
to sit,
to partake.

then, into the steam of creation,
where farm-raised met man-made,
and the soup that stirred us so deeply
was crushed from
spiny shells
from something sap-like,
verdigris.

it was the day after,
and the night before,
and we did not know the morning wait would be so long.

that the rain would come down so soft,
and the wind would be so hard,
and that we would cluster with the others,
and still smile.

that children would bring roses,
and strangers bear cake,
and one lone girl would bring dry socks
“so you don’t get cold feet”.

that the countdown to the front door
would become so epic,
that being among the three thousand
would be nothing
compared to the first time we spoke those words.

history writes itself unexpectedly into our lives.

I did not get on one knee to him.

I looked into his eyes above the sea,
the golden gate behind him,
and begged him to understand.

forgive.

to love me
enough.

to find his way past the expected,
and my clumsy passion,
and the way
we would want things to be.

to stand with me for seven hours
waiting.
to say those few words before a stranger.
to hold a piece of paper
that said
for the first time in a country’s history,
as he had told me so often in our history,
yes.

and the nettle soup at delfina’s
was as tender
as his answer,

as only the unplanned in life
can be.

GLS
5/25/04

the advent -

2011-02-16T10:30:00.000-08:00

the small things are sent to us
through slowly opened doors,
driven in like rain on pavement.
the small things remind us
with their lives
and tilted heads
of our own exposure.

the top of her head
smells
like a word I can no longer wrap my mouth around,
a moment I know I lived, in the sun,
a time that probably
never existed.

the way she moves from him to I
unable to touch both
like the tide reaching
for the sandcrabs and the moon.

the pattern of her breath
on my thigh
in sleep.

her nose lifted to the scent of cooking
and may
and the sound of the front door crackling open.

his eyes upon her.
then me.

the small things
are the recognition of you. and I.

GLS
5/12/04

the location of the lindens -

2011-02-15T14:22:00.000-08:00

Like the love I have been given,
the map
is veiled to all but god.

unable to forecast
yet not forbidden,
my life has wound around me like the
clattering of laughter up the stairwell,
like the launching of dust motes
through the sunlight
of that window.

the one beside our bed,
so often covered with the blinds,
flimsy bars,
unable to control the sounds of the street
or the fingers of the trees,
the ones I wish were lindens
for their magical smell.

that only comes once a year,
from the temple down the block,
holding me so tightly those two weeks
with that scent that is at once
known,
and untraceable.

like the oriental rugs of st.simons,
or the takashimaya on your clavicle,
it is a summoning
more than a memory,
bringing back the best of us,
of me,
of us.

it is a gift.

and it runs from temple to temple,
both holy places,
both maps of something I have yet to see whole.

that when I see whole,
I will see,
perhaps,
you.

GLS
7.6.04

the tenth poem –

2011-02-02T15:17:00.000-08:00

of you, I spoke in rhythm,
with waves and pleasure
banging my calves as I began.

knowing not.
caring little.

opening my mouth
to the possibility of poetry
in your being.

and this led,
as all words do,
to miscomprehension and interpretative fault
and long pauses
and hesi
tation.

so i spoke more of love,
as if to capture
in the noise
some essence
of that thing
that makes me dizzy with you.

and it was infantile,
as all words will be
when we utter
love.

so I spake of my own being
and tried to keep it short.

which is very hard to do
for one who speaks
so
much.

and it was
predictably dictable,
dour,
and rife with words like rife.

so I spoke of things we shared
and then things we knew
and then things material,
then immaterial,
and the words cluttered the air
around me,
filtered through the place between us,
gnatlike possessions,
so the light became viscous and milky.

and I spoke softly to myself
to hear
my own
voice.

I spoke softly to myself
to reach you.

and then,
I stopped speaking,
and simply opened my eyes.

GLS
12.30.04

the disappation -

2010-03-11T12:24:00.001-08:00

-

In the beginning, there was a word.

“duende”.

It meant to me a state of unexpected bliss,

a gift of unseen origin,

a dreamless, sun-filled sleep.

I would wrap my mouth around it in the day,

while surrounded by strangers,

while waiting for change,

thinking

of you.

“duende, duende, duende”, I would say,

imagining a Castilian lisp to impart the proper

taste

of sea salt

and lemon rind.

I grew my hair out for you,

I took you where you had not yet been,

and I stood in front of mirrors,

wondering

if what I wore

would affect the outcome.

When I tried to find the definition

the way we all do these days,

without the smell of yellowed paper

or the crisp sound of information turning under fingertip,

flip, and turn,

creases of old ink and perhaps out-dated impressions,

the search

came up

null.

The only thing that I could find was surrounded by goblins,

and a trail to the Spanish arts.

Even the internet was confused.

My word was “hard to define”.

My word was lost,

intangible,

faded through the ether.

“In fact, tener duende can only be loosely translated as having soul.”

damsel and distress -

2010-03-11T12:13:00.000-08:00

an incantation
something like a spell,
something that requires myrrh and blood of doves,
something dark and pure to trace in the air
around them
to protect them
to guard them from the night.

close your eyes and think of the green eyed girl,
the one who always laughed first,
the one who did not watch for signs,
and barely read the tales,
for she seemed to know
that she would simply live
and others would write of her, this time.

close your eyes and think of the tall boy,
the one who leapt in the air,
the one who led the way because he did not have time to wait.
think of how he felt when he saw her,
the light in her eyes,
her shoulder bare and golden,
and think of how he leapt, then.

we were all lulled to sleep
with stories of finding and loss,
with wolves and witches and mirrors that kept secrets,
so what do you do
when the story is much simpler,
when the magic is just about
them?

you hold your breath.
you count the seconds.
you watch as they touch
and there is nothing to compare.

fresh,
like mornings over mountains.

clear,
like water over stone.

new,
like the same smile, the one you know,
coming to you again.

this is love.

and it does not matter who rescues whom.

you can close the book, now.

there is no incantation to protect them. to lead them. to keep them. to hold them.

there is no power
that you can provide.

this is not their ever after.
this is their now.

LS
9/27/03

object lesson -

2010-03-11T12:12:00.001-08:00

in the garden there are aspens now turning yellow.
and roses, now slowing, still blooming white.
in the closets there are sweaters the colors of wet stones;
stacks of scarves so elaborate each deserves its orange box,
disregarding, perhaps,
being bound up alone.

the baccarat is ruby,
a gift given gradually,
a collection of crystal from a fragile man.
there are plates shaded like sand dunes
and flatware like seashells
and floors like a child’s blood
drawn in preschool.

there is velvet on the sofa like the sky before dusk
and leather cracked and golden like the sky after dawn.
the lamps are black lacquer
and the walls are hot chocolate
or coffee or licorice or bittersweet
to taste.

the linens on the bed will flicker like candlelight
violet and cream,
sepia and white.
the walls of the bedroom will glow in that candlelight:
strawlike and stemlike
crisp and silk striped.

and they all flicker madly
to catch your attention,
they compete and repeat their chorus to the night.

but I have your hand and your mouth and your eyesight,
and I fill your head
and I color your life.

GLS
10.30.02

the gray circle -

2010-03-11T12:12:00.000-08:00

and so the colors of the night, revealed to none yet known by all,
rush heady and headlong into this room.

the candle now cliche by bed
has rimmed the wall with elephant skin and lit the edge of your
topography
like sunrise setting on a veldt.

and your fingers seek my skin like rainfall
pattering to find their way,
my blood responds beneath the tensile, slick, productive surface skin,
though it cannot see the hand
or the force that moves it from above.

and the gray circle in my eyes that binds the color,
that binds the dark,
contracts so slightly
you can hear it rustle;
an animal in tall grass
a limb under a moon.

there are no beatings and the breath is held, suspension over the world tonight.

for when two lovers find the tinder,
fumble for flint,
for a word fit to ignite,
the gray circle
expands
again,
it does not tighten,
it reaches outward, afraid to bind the very thing that makes it holy,
the kiss of a lover,
the look in his eye.

GLS
8.14.01

the summer after, noon -

2009-10-20T19:33:00.000-07:00

In a corner somewhere near
lies my history.

I have put it down momentarily,
not really watching the time,
in order to plant some rosebushes,
in order to bind a trellis to a fence.

I wish to watch,
for awhile.
to see the buds form burst brown fall.
to see the twine darken rust flake fall.
to feel the world stretch moan turn and rise.

I raced to get here,
I pushed hard and felt little.

which is why the story of me
will remain dormant for now.

it is time for the story of everything else,
and this time,
I only wish to hear.

the words will come again.
I have always known this about words.
they fail you when you need them.
they run over you when you are tired.

iceberg roses on a fence in a yard.
sun through the trees in the afternoon heat.
a car passing over the manhole down the block, and coming closer.

I will not take this turn. I will pass.

GLS
07.11.02

the taste of love –

2009-08-13T12:42:00.000-07:00

the place where there are no gifts,
the moment where there are no words,
the location of loss
and the parallel of joy,
here is where love at last rests.

I have watched a decade,
both empty of you and full,
skip before me like ribbon down a stairwell,
and I know that I have learned nothing
and learned it a million times.

I know that there is no way to pinpoint
and that definition is something best left for scholars
far brighter than I.
I know that I am quicksilver and that you are stone;
that you are the wind and I am stone;
that the world changes with an utterance,
and in a day is made unwhole.

how interwoven are we,
like fingers into fists?
or are we drawn along a skein more silken,
expected to form a mantilla for shelter, a coverlet for night?

I hear sentences in the air,
and I close my eyes and reach for the ground, to find you, where you are not listening.
and I am thankful for your earth rich constancy,
for your orbital pull upon my corpse,
and your visceral pull on my soul.

I do not deserve, but I demand. and you will provide,
unable to resist the potion or the poison,
mead of my lips and my mind,
biting and dark, saplike and viscous, tender as night,
spilled upon a page or a sheet or a parchment or sand.
it matters not which age.

you will be there.

at this point so relative, where hands are taken off
the clock,
I shake, I breathe, I release, I void,
for we are going to be here awhile.

LS
02.14.02

why blue is your color –

2009-07-06T16:27:00.000-07:00

when I first saw you, it was not as intimate as later,
when you watched my back
and forgave me.

when I first touched you, and then your skin,
it was not as powerful as when I was apart from you
and could not sleep,
could not dream,
could not settle for days with you missing.

when I knew your love, it was not through your words,
but through your eyes,
and the way they held me,
across a room,
and the woman, like Elizabeth, she droned on,
unaware
that I was
aloft.

the smell of you dissipates through the day,
until only the slight touch of the
Japanese fragrance
remains on your tendons,
and then it is mine,
because only I am allowed
to be
this close.

and I am weaker than when we started, and less sure.

and you are stronger, I think.

and once,
you held my hand in public,
and told me that you loved me,
and I closed my eyes.

because I knew that I would not survive
the color of your eyes
if I did not.

GLS
10.30.02

fall awake-

2009-05-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

I was rocked like a child
by your movements in sleep.

it allowed me to place you in my world,
left,
near,
leaden.

but before I return,
let me tell you something I think I have learned,
just now.

age is settling itself upon me,
and holding my hand on Tuesdays,
when I used to bound restlessly
but now simply
turn,
ruffled by the wake of things like death
and distance,
concepts new to this life.

it is easier to let beauty pass,
not to grip it hard,
but to anticipate it's going.

I think it will return,
in hands on a bus rail,
or a hawthorne bloom;
but this is small.

I weary.
I ennervate.
I tremble at the end of phone lines.

and still,
your simple nocturnal pulse holds more for me than I could put to paper.

this is love, at this age.

beautiful, it is.

GLS
6.10.98

forecast uncertain -

2009-04-20T15:28:00.000-07:00

empathy, like the rain,
cannot be foretold.

charts and graphs may hope to track
the gentle, sloping apogee of
nimbus high
or
snow drift.

but sympathy is not even in the realm of seers,
there are no telepaths
in daylight discussions
and horoscopes
can no longer
lead us, reliably.

so,
lingering in late white gardens
toeing the brick bordered paths,
or crossing the street
with a mantra muttered
and the hope of pinions
could not have prepared me.

it was like rain.

you flinch,
even though you know
it will not hurt you.

you search for cover,
though faith would demand you simply
receive.

when it happened.
I saw
someone, finally,
feeling for
me.

GLS
11.18.98

of ladybugs and skipping stones -

2009-04-10T10:06:00.000-07:00

the coat was brown this time, perhaps because she knew our palette,
or was settling into some personal winter.

the one before had landed in union pier,
separating from the cluster of red siblings above the door
and stretching across my back before we made it to the beach,
before the sun set on our left, trading sky with water,
before I sat beside paul
and time skipped something into the ever graying moment,
and tim, down the way, with two dogs at his heels was caught on camera,
he was still tall
and erin still was lovely and my
voice was still speaking as I moved into a cloud.

then this one found me perhaps by hunch,
or sympathetic vibration,
and walked with great deliberation into our home and put herself
where we would see
that time
sometimes
favors those who honor memory.

GLS
11.6.98

the durability of love -

2009-03-29T19:14:00.000-07:00

there is a music box in another room,
a room that is not mine,
and like the lit bathroom
and the dog with it's ears taped back,
I run from it simply because I must.

there is a music box in another room,
like a fragment of a dream,
recurring the following day,
it plays for a moment,
and leaves me disconcerted,
moved,
and still alone.

there is a music box in another room,
and no matter where I travel,
or place myself intentionally,
there it remains,
faint and pressing,
insistent and deliberate.

there is a music box in another room,
sweet sweet secret of the child,
hollow eyes from lacking sleep,
trembling with morning passion and the birth of sunlight,
it reaches through the lists to find the human soul.

there is a music box in another room,
where you had placed it,
not an actual box,
with no real tune,
but important nonetheless,
because your hands touched it in the other room.

and I was not there.

GLS
2.17.98

The ladies of regret -

2009-03-22T20:20:00.000-07:00

oh, these elegant women.
walking quietly into my life,
with their gris and speckled eyes,
how they settle at my side,
how they hold my hand,
uninvited.

Do not cry to me companion of my youth, and tell me of the struggle
to return to whom you were.
The creature prints,
and wedding you hate,
and bells still ringing around your head.
There were choices when you sat
in the conference room,
when we walked above the river at night,
watching the city glint,
dancing with drag queens on Friday.

You were led away from your daydreams,
by steps all your own.
And you, with the well known beauty,
what drifts below your face,
currents of something even Paul will never know.
I suspect treachery at times,
delicious treacles,
interludes you savor all alone.

I guess.

And I know.

Fear motivates us,
and secures our seclusion.

But oh, the lovely.
In you I can only see pain,
ill-concealed, '
well worn
across your expanse.
The world has brought you much,
often,
soon.

Elizabethan porcelain,
without saucer for the overflow,
you live balanced upon breakage,
wanting to be held in a curved palm.

And when drugs can't regulate the jagged,
and the men don't rescue your body,
and your itches drive you
to cut yourself and drain,
I wish I could hold you again,
my oldest friend,
my unexpected redhead,
I am
ineffectual
to
you.

They walk into other rooms,
carrying my number,
folded where they will never find it,

soft inside.

GLS
6.12.97

the kiss that lasts all day -

2009-03-12T14:17:00.000-07:00

he is my one,
though unpredicted,
this much I have come to know.

sometimes the learning is more powerful than the knowing
will be.

I have welcomed his intrusions,
and held him at bay,
and had no choice in the matter.

Eyes like those
brook no denial;
it angers me at times,
this helplessness.

Large hands on my neck,
the song of lilies,
the smell of linens and crustings;
I can taste the sleep.

Speaking to empty vessels,
brimming myself,
close to tears.

hold me hold me hold me hold me

I am just believing
because that's all you ever have.

And he keeps coming back,
through the sticky locks
on my heart,
and the barricades of the day,
and even the distances
in himself.

I need to believe.

Because dishes break and pictures fade
and stamens darken and tum,
and only the tilt of my head in the curl of his palm
and the closing eye
matter
now

or ever.

GLS
8.8.97

lure -

2009-02-26T12:10:00.000-08:00

I can imagine what it feels like,
your hair in my hands,
rich and chestnut around my knuckles,
deep like this.

I like your eyes and your voice,
but to bite that lower lip,
makes me salivate.

You speak and I am thrown back to lockerrooms and sweat,
with adolescent moaning.

It is southern for me,
opening like a magnolia,
just above my teenage grasp.

Those trees were always below my window,
and over my head.

An impulsive little creature,
I made the boys
vibrate
with anticipation.

Touch their shoulders,
friendly, light, and of course,
discomforting.
This is the most obvious way
to start the chord
in them,

three notes

that will crescendo in their nights.

Impress on them how you would feel.
This kiss,
no other,
will make John move as a leaf on a branch;
has made Booker grow heavy as stone.

I am their Lot.

So let me feel your collapse,
erode
to my gentle lapping,
for I long to feel your hair in my hands,
taste the salt of your skin
as you cry.

GLS
6.11.97

All things bound are not enslaved -

2009-02-17T15:25:00.000-08:00

The gray car was the first sign.

Cresting through that evening on Belden,
shipbound by the fog,
obscured by the breath inside,
the vehicle should have told me much.

After there came flowers,
waxy leaved and spotted,
exuding things like promise
along with stifling scent,
always wrapped in paper first,
then fainting
to the floor.

And I should have watched the feedings,
the things stirred into iron pots,
archaic delicacies that spoke to my throat,
of fire,
of bindings,
of reliance.

Certain moths have wings the color of your eyes.

Weren't you warned of the coming of night,
and of mushroom rings that enslaved the dance?
Houses made of bones?

But I had never heard of men with such needs,
or of this soft,
allergic skin.

Timothy drove me in his gray car,
Michael fixed me barbeque,
Thaddeus woke me under his arm,
Francis was the first.

So name the monster after saints,
and wait till day expires,
lure him with your jealous kiss,
'til you're all that he desires.

GLS
9.4.96

the text message -

2009-02-09T19:04:00.000-08:00

some dull small hope
some decision not to feel
some anticipated ending
some understanding of the real
some gram measure of resignation
some despair
some desire
some pierson on the bookshelf
some momentary lies
to myself.

some sense of the best of me
awoken after dormancy.

some reluctance to admit
defeat.

some sorrow
and some thankfulness
some motion
and some acceptance
that it was not
meant
to continue
past this
solitary point.

some feeling that it gave too much happiness
and that intensity
would burn
some of me
and all of he.

some leaden knowledge
that there would be no
we.

LS
2.6.09

the drumbeat, the bullet, the unknown -

2009-02-09T19:03:00.000-08:00

you’re true
because you cannot see yourself
and the way you part the air,
shimmer,
menace my every sense with the musky
glamour
of your sex
and rambling tonic of your eyes.

the feral taste of your mouth on mine,
the pine and curl of fetlock
and haunch
are violence to my life.

your slow lope behind me
as we pass in to your bedroom
kills my voice
even as your arms surround my chest
and I dissolve
into some carnal
blood-filled
creature.

and for the first time I feel my pulse.
and for the first time I taste the metal.
and for the first time I am unknown.

and all this makes my hands tremble as I drive
away.

and makes me wake,
dry throated,
sore.

and I am afraid,
not of what you have turned in me,
but of what truth
I can not name.

LS
1.04.09

gravitas -

2009-01-04T15:46:00.000-08:00

I will not ask you to explain.

when the moon tears at the seas,
calling with some force that we have tried to define
as “gravity”,
I hear instead the echo of sadness
in her light
a keening against the distance between her surface
and the reflective shimmer of the saltwater
below.

I have seen, and never questioned,
as leaves and petals and the injured
drop
as if summoned by the earth
to return
now
home.

I have felt the sinking and the rising
in my own chest
when you enter the room.

I do not need to know of circumference or of apogee,
of lunar cycles or the time between
when we touched
and when we met
and when I knew.

every night, I close my eyes beneath the moon
that I was born beneath.

and I now know why I have been drawn to the sea
and the air
each night
in my dreams.

LS
1.04.09

travelogue -

2009-01-04T15:45:00.000-08:00

I am building a list of things.

not objects
but densities,
better described by touch
than by words.
things I would like to die
within.

buried beneath water.

enveloped in limestone.

entombed by cloud-light.

few things in a lifespan
remain:
stone,
water,
the presence of change.

at the palacio duhau, staring at the gardens,
I wish your voice were among the things
I list.

LS
11.13.08

sordid / divine -

2009-01-04T15:44:00.002-08:00

Walked down that alley and lost that money.

Stood naked at the window,
drunk and waiting to be seen.

Left the group to walk the city alone,
and spoke no Spanish
at all.

Drove flowers to the redhead,
who did not understand them.

Wrote stories about the blonde,
to destroy him.

Slept with the brunette to remind him,
and confuse him.

Closed the door to be alone,
even against the whine
and the stare.

Wandered those dark hallways
with the half-open doors,
the spillage of light,
delicious.

Taken the drug to soften the edge,
speed up the heart rate,
end the turbulence outside,
or sleep.

Lived out the forbidden in order to see
more clearly in the shadows.
And to get over
regret.

If I had truly known

I would have
still
done the same.

LS
sometime in november, 08

Before -

2009-01-04T15:44:00.001-08:00

I wish I could capture the air for you today.

There is the sense of something impending,
and suddenly I remember the way the skies turned green
before hurricanes
in my teenage years.
This air is different,
there is not weight, there is lightness,
there is flavor,
and suddenly my eyes well up
and my stride soften.

And there are birds, birdsong,
so many birds,
but I can see no trees.

This can only mean
the coming
is momentous,
if it is stirring unseen wings.

If you were here, before I reached the corner
I would ask you.

And you, perhaps,
would take my hand,
take the corner,
and tell me
to just
wait.

LS
5.13.08

hibernate -

2009-01-04T15:42:00.000-08:00

I have taken the drugs to put myself under
but still, I am forced to watch the night sky.

It is lit from below by this city I do not
understand,
or wish to comprehend. I think I was enamored too early
by the spring that was eternal,
by the views at every turn.

Home has always been my refuge,
and now I find that I am more fugitive
from these gray skied mornings and cloud covered nights,
yearning for the consistency of changing weather,
of seasons that lead eventually
to snow.

Because snow knows no enemies,
it bring no fear.

It covers all equally,
masks and blankets,
muffles and stills.

It is heavy solace to the long year past,
layered like forgiveness over allergen and pod,
forcing dormancy,
and what I most seek,
sleep.

LS
sometime in january, 08

A stem, a leaf, a limit -

2009-01-04T15:41:00.001-08:00

I remember
when she sent galax leaves.

A strange thought to have on this Friday.

Leaning back, the emptiness of the afternoon
and the gray light outside,
december without spirit
december of so much /
too much.
And I am tired of this survival
mode.

And I could smell them.

The way a green is supposed to smell,
from a stream along her mountainside,
old and still
undercut with stone
undercut with whiteside.

And it soothed me.
There is no other word
for leaves in a plastic bag,
bound in cotton,
wet with forethought
from a mother stopping on her hike
to gather something up
for her child.

just a step beyond the rain –

2009-01-04T15:40:00.002-08:00

with the birds on the wire,
waiting for the fog to part in the mission,
it began to clarify.
waiting for the rays to outline their bodies,
etch them, bleeding gray out from their charcoal feathers,
into a splintering day,
I could see.

with the dado of the Victorian,
when we returned from walking the dog,
thirty some steps from our home on the hill,
you could see.
carved in plaster:
two mountains, one tree.
and turning to see one tree, two peaks,
and the lit window, waiting,
just below.

it seems now we live where the sun begins,
where the sky stays open above us in inclemency,
where even the stars cluster to escape the rain.
the embrace of the weather is around us.
see the valley to either side fill:
here a chalice,
here a bowl.

this is mystic, set in the sky,
mounted like a diadem unreachable by quest.
the last was grounded, settled in stone,
cornered where winds met.
perhaps they conspired
to keep the world at bay.

my home is was will be with you,
belden on,
rocoe on,
aldine on,
now.
and I need no signs to reveal.
I have known this
from the moment I heard of you,
once in a lullaby.

room 1122 –

2009-01-04T15:40:00.001-08:00

the city of angels
the city of light
the city that never sleeps

angels, light, and insomnia meet
up in the air
tonight.

I open the curtains and think of you somewhere
distant,
colder,
to my left up the coast.

I would listen for you
over the hum of the strip
but the harmony of stopping and starting
the lights both white (on the left)
and red (on the right)
all blur the frequency of cell phone
and heartbeat.

I wish for a map
as if it will solve
my fingers tracing the windowpane
up the curve of sunset (on the left)
and down fountain (on the right)
like the curve of the seine past la reine blanche
like the path from 685 east 82nd
to the park
where the sprinklers lie.

I wish for a map
to find my way back
to that place where I ran through false rain
to where we ate free and walked on cobblestone
to you.

I am facing east in the evening.

I am three cities.

I am too far from you.

stay in Central -

2009-01-04T15:39:00.000-08:00

When we walked the room,
a circle,
and felt the walls
in wood
we were being taught about the space we take
and the space
we take for granted.

The light in hong kong is shimmering,
through pollution and through rain,
and at night,
the neon trims your face
with expectation.

There,
vast is an expectation,
a statement about progress
and the visual
to progress.

There is no retreat.

But we found ourselves in retreat,
reaching for surface treatments,
a shagreen banister,
a parchment bartop,
a concrete wall,
an easy grasp.

A view over to Kowloon.
A red sailed junk in the harbor.
A sightline
to each
other.

In return
I miss the wooden walls,
the darkness
and the movement.

Somehow they combined there
without thought
or fear.

So now, we shrink.
Intentionally.

Now, we curl around a future,
sheltering an unknown
desire
to expand

as we step away.

The two years we lost –

2009-01-04T15:37:00.002-08:00

This year I lost you
because you left me.

This year I lost you
because you lied and were afraid.

This year I lost you
because I was inconstant, and impermanent.

This year I lost you
because I focused on myself.

This year I lost you
because fear trumped ritual, and habit was abandoned to pressure.

This year I lost you
and therefore lost myself.

So feel me grabbing at you,
and know that I am real,
this time.

Because in my momentary exit from our life
somehow
I always felt you
where you belong.

Feel yourself found.

linger and reload –

2009-01-04T15:34:00.000-08:00

he was
powder between my fingertips
ice finding its way out of the glass
the underpetal of the lamb’s ear,
and to know
him
was a slipknot
on the verge
of
pulling me apart.

I knew. it was stupid.

spiderveins of tension under every moment
chattering legs
and sudden luscious gusts
of warm air on my back
tiny hairs
slapping.

the whites of his earlobes under curl of
hair.

he was
low summer after light
green sky before thunderstrike
moan
in
my
ear.

I should have stopped
at once.

but then,
he was
fresh-cut grass smell,
slick leaf,
a green paste on tongue,
a burn, and tears
in my eyes.

GLS
02.06.04

one for the master and one for the maid -

2009-01-04T15:33:00.002-08:00

offerings are always monumental,
requiring sacrifice
in order to
appease.

I can see the lines around my brows
and feel the taut line of my belly
as it leads from hip to rib
I can smell my soap and scented skin
through my clothing.

I search now for what you need,
what part of me is not tiring to your eyes
and to your touch,
disbelief
my only guide.

after this time,
you still feel me
as if I am new, birthed into your compass,
fresh.

the taste of the familiar does not tire you.

the way I age this day
is not unlike any other.
cells leave me, sleep eludes me.

the landscape is full
of doe-like
of unsuspecting
of ravishing.

still.
I am in your arms.
for this blessed time
I am bloodless,
rimmed in light,
suspended from the world of man,
holy.

yours.

and I no longer wonder
what I have given up
or what I have been put upon.

the lamb is not allowed recourse.

and it is only blood and stone.
the sharp taste of the moment
and the dull slide of the past
keep us
alive.

GLS
01.06.04

repeat after me –

2009-01-04T15:33:00.001-08:00

because beyond the moonlight of the moment,
there will be the unattractive angle,
the harsh overhead light,
a dark circled morning.

because there are things I cannot change
about you
though I would
if given power over genetic tic
or habit learned.

(make you watch as I watch,
laugh as I laugh,
see through my lens,
myopic. kaleidoscopic.)

because you are not as you appear
so often
to others,
graceful, kind, and wholesome.
rather:
monosyllabic,
moody and withdrawn.

a cave without an echo.

because your disregard for routine
leads to angry letters,
unpaid dues,
and blithe disregard of my rants,
a check mark washed by rain.

for every time
you do not understand
what the pull of my needs must be.

with every missed call
and unreturned missive,
that I keep count of.

in every swallowed comment in anger
that brews inside me
and froths
with right.

but,
devoid of fault,
you would be hollow
in my eyes.

because I know just this,
I
choose you.

GLS
7.8.04

something that reaches deep inside –

2009-01-04T15:31:00.000-08:00

it is not the green or the rhyme.
without reason, it chooses.
debate it as you will,
in the end it does not matter,
it will decide for you,
leave you,
and you will know too late to wonder.

it is mechanism in retrospect,
decision that you made that led to this place here,
snow without footprints,
dog asleep, breathing, on your numbing leg,
picture fallen from album found under blanket,
email in the inbox,
never opened.

it is chilling to the sense of freedom
we are told to cherish
when it happens,
but it happens,
and there is a sudden glimpse of the plan.

a silk and shining map
beneath us.

we should know from their return
that it is happening
(now, it is happening)
friends left unforgiven,
family presents unbought and unsent and unspoken.
love never released.

back because the twine had twisted
and the shimmer of heat from the road
was a warning
you did not see.
and so you, in the front door, as my car pulled away,
and the photograph of us in the halflight on that mountain,
and Lauren walking slowly in the wet grass, in the white dress,
and how thin the dog was after the trip,
and the letter you use as a bookmark at night,
and your mother’s voice on the answering machine tape,
and the name of the orchid,
and the story we tell of the night we met,
and lying alone on the warm stone floors,
and aspens,
and choosing a color, a diamond, a band,
and the light in the trees, the light in the trees
(you always stopped me to see that, light in the trees)

and it will only be later

that you will know if it is arbitrary

or merely

reaching deeper.

GLS
11.14.04

How the end must feel -

2009-01-04T15:28:00.001-08:00

I will wear green and face the sun.

a white noise of heat and pressure, a glinting reverie, a removal.
a great gift of a simple day
a plan not made
a removal, again.

the turmoil of your language
which I am deciphering in parses
and the way in which I deserve this,
this uncertainty,
this groping,
it leaves me without the sleep I so crave,
it woke me often at first,
then less so
then more so
then more so, again.

I have loved you well and I have loved you long;
I have written so often of your eyes.

and I have left you in the place where I now find myself.

but I am not good in this universe,
I survive best in my own.

I long for this scarf,
this twist of air and cashmere,
this thing to wrap around my shoulders
my neck,
like a cry,
like a tourniquet,
like a bird held roughly in the hand,
all of these things,
sound and blood and anger,
all of these things, again.

for I survive enough, already.

limited peace is what we are allowed, then certain uncertainty.

the scarf, it is green.

it goes with my eyes.

it will keep me warm,
in the sun.

GLS
9.30.03

the little and the grand -

2008-07-22T18:51:00.000-07:00

how can he hope to take measure of her heart,
with the calipers, or grams, or tongs from the wall?

she knows no measure of her own.
she is marcella in the evening,
ladling out emotion
over pots that steam and bubble,
infused with her intent.

she encircles her brown eyed companions with high pitched odes to joy,
with rollicking rolling affection,
with protection and with pride.

she watches over her charges,
guards them from themselves,
marshalling her sabrinas
and her landis
separating inner conflicts,
and feeding them
when they fade.

for him she invokes passion
and the abandon she has only known when in his arms
and in his sight,
addicted to him,
the unexpected.

and in her eyes are oceans,
and starlight behind cloud cover,
and something that runs rapid and yet never speaks its name.

so she knows no easy confine,
and there is no chart to register the way that she loves living;
there is no measure for this heart.

LS
4.11.01

the invitation -

2008-07-20T18:43:00.000-07:00

Feel this?

That's me, the bad man.
I am here in your room,
behind this chair,
pressing things upon you that you never knew,
watching you tremble
In joy.

That is my finger on your nipple,
and my thumb besides,
pulling up
daisies
like the drunken gardener,
ripe on lust
redolent with pain.

Yes, my lips.

Tongue,
raspy on the neck's sweet fleshy part.

Pomegranate,
open for me.

Now,
close your eyes.

You are not unconscious,
eating my stubble,
beg for more in your
bowl.

Think of me in light,
the perimeter of a time when you were electric
with sensation.

Do I stake this plot as owned?

Gone,
like a groggy morning.
Left,
as you kept traveling forward.

The air the only evidence
that I was even there.

I can do all this without touching one hair.

I am the one warned about.

And I will come for you.

GLS
7.28.97

her hold on me -

2008-07-20T18:40:00.000-07:00

So she will sit in Central Park,
sometime in the sixties,
with legs curled as a calligraph,
and hair bound with a scarf,
and arms pressing down,
to hold the earth,

a young Grace,
with green eyes.

Or she will tum the faulted corner
with a word like phyllo or duerme,
and I will see her absorbed with Maria,
brushing her hair back
in a Puerto Rican spell.

She was not a woman who would ever dance alone.

I wondered at one point,
had someone spirited her away,
told her things
that we were never meant to hear,
so did she,
unwittingly,
bake them into her breads,
ladle them into our bowls,
scent her golden hair with whispers.

That would explain much.

Why there was a chill when she left a room.

Quiet when she tired of things.

Safety in her arms and the sound of her Spanish,
the mother tongue I never learned.

The balance of her love was heavy on this heart,
and marks me to this day.

Children must grow,
though I never thought myself
the child.

GLS
8.7.96

the agony of the leaves -

2008-07-20T18:39:00.000-07:00

now I know how it can change you,
the knowledge of it's coming,
how it can force the color from your eyes,
and bleed it from your voice.

I saw it in your face when you heard,
the way the wind swept you internally,
and you were altered.

Knowing is crueler than we can anticipate.

The phone told you,
called your name,
and gave you the word.

And my blue-eyed boy went pale.

The moment will rob you,
take and take and take
her away,
but you will have to wait,
death will take it's time, take it's toll.

Perhaps take you,
turning you about,
forcing the stem and the root and the reach of your past.

How I fear for you,
and the way this will move us,
dropping to the earth.

Let us settle together,
seek the warmth in the snow,
burrow or slumber,
grieve near her heart
while mine beats
on.

GLS
12.3.96

and, I love you -

2008-06-22T09:52:00.002-07:00

I believe you beside me on the carpet,
staring at my profile.

I feel you breathless above me,
gasping to a shoulder.

Because I know that words are the long-limbed roses of emotion:
symbolic of the feeling,
rarely true expressions of the moment.

So bring me bushels of stargazers,
let me wallow in their scent.
Blow out the candles,
and fumble for me in heated darkness,
outline me in tongue and finger.

Avoid everything I say.

Remain on the path you are wearing,
relentless, restless,
to my heart.

GLS
1.13.92

Sign language -

2008-06-22T09:52:00.001-07:00

Somewhere north of Shakespeare,
dark rain on my face becomes more than an enervating pattern;
it becomes a reminder:
look past an anger,
find.

Above the personifications
that men have made to soothe a fear,
beyond the dicatates and codes placed in words,
there must lie something wingless
and grand.

I feel it on my face and sense it in the gutters,
spreading its prick across my skin,
that concrete,
this puddle on a sidewalk in my life.

Responsive to sheer desire
more than canted prayers,
comforting the unknowing, the unknown,
those lost to the touch of communal decisions,
something stirs in spring grasses,
lingers over warm kitchens,
wakes infants softly in the night.

And I don’t care, it doesn’t matter,
that I am alone again in lamplight,
that I am soaking in the rain,
opening my eyes to the wind,
because I am not lost. I am past all of that.

As if it knows it is losing its youth,
to the ineptness of dogma,
the hostility of diction;
something seeks to hold in other ways

The rain is before me
and will be after me;
but tonight, its beauty is mine.
Its tracery on still water,
its sifting through the trees,
its sheeting refusal of passing cars,
its right over stars,
its simple wet.

I claim it by raising a dry palm,
stigmatize skin with cool,
and I know that I am walking in water,
on land, through air.

Beneath the touch
of something without arms,
I and others will have to sleep.
Yeah, I’m caught by this symbol.
From twelve when I rode through the storm,
and the tires of my Raleigh sliced open ponds,
my skin loved the feel of speed and close water;
I was caught in the mesmeric need.

It was then I was first lost.

Rain has no denouement.
Like life, it ends.
I wallow in this night-fall.
I am laughing alone in this single rain.

GLS
3.5.92

Death is necessary -

2008-06-22T09:51:00.000-07:00

I was told things that I did not wish to know,
and stumbled out of the room, through the almost snow, to the darkened bed,
curled and moaning,
waiting for him.
I had enjoined Persephone’s grief unknowingly;
never seekin the Greek span of truth, even as I revealed it to others.
I had thought truth between a mother and son
basic, essential,
necessary.
Of course, nothing is inherently necessary.

She looked to me in the artificial hotel light,
and before comfort came the tearing in her eyes,
she was screaming at what she didn’t want to hear,
internally drowning out.
I didn’t know.
I didn’t know.
I didn’t know but I opened her like a pomegranate
and spilled her pulpy secrets
over my hands,
red and seedy things not of my doing,
now of my knowing.

God, I don’t want to be an adult,
I whispered to his chest,
I don’t want.
You’ve always been one, he said, his lips in my hair,
his arm beneath my head.

Persephone, in her initial darkness, felt this.
Never fully returning. Always mistrusting the sun.
This is the shock of untold things upon our perceptions.
Persephone had bad dreams that night.

But I know that words between parent and child
must
first be spoken, revealed, exposed,
before they curl and dust like leaves left untended on the path to winter.
I loved this woman too much to lie.
And she trusted enough to tell.
Though it made me think of suicides.
The reasons why.

Probably, mother, they are tired of knowing.
Human capacity for pain is limited,
and I believe,
our tolerance for those things which wear us down
is much less.

The discordant underworld knows of me now,
its substitute lullabyes will sing me to sleep for some time.

Never tell, Never tell, Never tell
lie.

GLS
12.17.92

Define veronica -

2008-06-22T09:50:00.004-07:00

destination: Turin

I drive to the desert, I'm not sure which one.
Through the windshield, which is cracked where a stone
left it's place on earth and was met by speeding glass,
the sun becomes as molten copper blown to dandelion blur,
sharding the darkening sky.
Some distance ahead lie the mesas. Too far.
I will park before the sun is gone,
and walk out into the sand.
With luck, the wind will cover my steps,
leaving waves of taupe that do not move.
I will settle where no one can reach me.
Dissolution will be dry.
Peace will be senseful.

Houston, 1992

Mother, pull down the blinds, it's bright in here.
I've something to explain.
It's about the need to leave the television running,
the door open, the lights on.
To confuse those who will come looking,
(they always do, you know)
by leaving everything in order.
"No sign of struggle",
but I wanted to leave.
To breathe without anyone knowing.
Dissolution seamless, peace invisible.

It happens most when I am
alone, watching trees, noticing the apparent, shocked, close to sleep.
Movement seems the only way
away. It may be why I grind my teeth,
and why I, for some reason, despise roses
unless they are white.

Though I do love the concept of angels.
To move amongst men
without their knowledge or consent.
To touch them gently,
brush them with words and wings.
To lift from earthly constraints,
to linger in the crossdrafts of lovers' partings and meetings,
a presence that can reach,
then drift to the expanses of some unknown plain,
and see the sun without a windshield.

veronica n [ML, fr. Veronica St. Veronica] (1700) : an image of Christ's face
said to have been impressed on the cloth
that St. Veronica gave him
to wipe his face with
on the way
to his crucifixion.

GLS
5.2.92

Escape pentameter -

2008-06-22T09:50:00.003-07:00

Over the lines,
her voice reverberates with Ithacan weather,
with pre-Easter evenings when the parties built high.
Wendy calls me,
over and over,
and as I force the flavor of grass and the smell of sun from my mouth,
the Persian New Year begins again.

Months in Kaske’s lectures on verse form,
skipping classes, showing late;
eating fried mushrooms at the Nines.
Our history was sudden and gangling,
a giraffe set loose in a small park.
But Wendy had hair like morning through gauze,
piles of invite and apples and curl.

Vodka. Cheap, mixed with lime, with soda;
a sheath dress the color of smoked plums,
heat that flooded the cotton on her skin
as we stumbled from the dance floor, brushed by the pool.
The flow of Spenserian stanzas clotted,
her Victorian skin a vessel
for my tentative touch, for my tongue’s passage.
Wendy knew the way a man’s body moved,
she found the crevasse for her lush,
soap-scented need.

We promised inconsistencies:
she would make pesto. I would treat her well.
It rained on us,
on the streets,
on her pale, freckled shoulders.
Her eyes trailed over the edge of my lips.

Later,
we returned to our ways.
Delegating places in life for each other,
staying “in touch”.
Sometimes, when she laughs long-distance,
I can smell her once-vibrant arousal,
and lilacs in rain.

GLS
3.9.92

Fault -

2008-06-22T09:50:00.001-07:00

As I come closer to the door,
the frame between places, I know that I will find the garden.

Beyond the old iron knob,
the first mists will just be lifting, mosslike,
from the fields. And the home I never lived in will be gray,
ramshackled to the oaks and the blue ridge mountains.
Turning the knob will be the act of bravery,
this I keep repeating,
but for some reason, it provides
little.

Every time I am brave I am also disappointed.
I am envious of the farmhouse garden,
tucked carefully in the sunny patch between those trees,
just off the porch,
with burgeoning tomatoes winking in the lifting mist.
I don’t like tomatoes, their color,
the pensive dip of vine and fleck of water,
the skin firm and juicy,
are states I can desire.
And they grow from dark soil,
ground earth, following metal paths,
and wallow in air and sun.

But they are a stupid fruit,
vine-ripened to be jerked off, sliced,
served.
They risk no truths, keep no secrets,
never act brave.

I open the door. And it is just the room, as always.
I want this dense room fresh
with the smell of bushel baskets.

As I lean to the frame,
my mother looks up from the patch,
beckons,
waits.
But I see her with my eyes closed;
the best way to enter gardens,
the best way to pretend.

Happle-

2008-06-22T09:49:00.001-07:00

Jane has the strength,
we have all felt it, the presence behind her eyes.
She draws upon it,
the analagous well, and I think,
herself.

I have seen it in likely places:
after she removes her rings so she can knead the dough;
the way she watches the road on rainy days;
her smile straining in discomfort.
Jane’s eyes alone stilled rooms.
But when her hand lay
on the arm of the weathered rocking chair,
the voice remained the same.

The halls were so noisy
when we yelled. Our voices hit harder,
impacting the skin.
Set upon each other,
we left scraps on the walls, almost pulp.
There are places where I can no longer stand.

In that upstairs room
she would hold me.
Words like pennies in the well,
absorbed, forgotten.
And my wishes would rise
like the smell of morning bread,
and flood her breath.

The halls are quiet. The roads are dry.

Jane, repeat after me.

GLS
8.27.92

The hundred seeds of night-

2008-06-22T09:48:00.002-07:00

The Finger Lakes wind through me
like the gorges at Cornell,
they pierce, they echo, they resonate,
though far.
I will not return to Cayuga,
or view it from “high above”,
but the vineyards at the lakeside
are my living metaphor.

Whey they are cut back, savagely,
to bloom again later,
you can trace the arch and twine of their limbs,
and feel the flooding in their roots.
What once was a lover’s fragrant curling,
tendrils burdened by blossom and grape,
becomes a flashing after-image,
the amputee of vision and promise.

These nights alone are like that,
imprints of the movement and the flesh
linger in the air,
flash the eye inside.
the sheets, like soil, absorbed the parts we spilled,
soaking and staining themselves paler,
as if with snow
fallen from twisted stalks.
The sheets are cold and broad,
like those fields of vine.

Even if they had voices,
the sheets or the fields,
they would whisper now,
so as not to disturb me as I remember,
as my fingers press down
as I implant.

GLS
4.8.92

Innocence nine -

2008-06-22T09:48:00.001-07:00

Across the Texas highway in the Jeep she wanted since high school,
Lauren and I drive.
It is January and cold. Damp from the skies
that traveled from thuren and I drive.
It is January and cold. Damp from the skies
that traveled from the Gulf,
and that is why the gloves.
No sound but the tires on the concrete,
and the shift as we adjust ourselves.
We have never done this.
I don’t know why she’s here.

I had to leave for awhile. Get out.
I can’t tell them that I’m damaged,
not because they’re parents but because they’re people
of sometimes simpler methods.
Comprehension is not beyond them,
but the repair is.
When I found the fault within,
it was not guilt but fear that drove me home,
drove me out to this road,
is still driving me.

I said that I had to take a trip.
I was just going.
She just packed and was there when I left.
I just drove.
It was a just action. Just because.

Now this cold weather is around us like a womb
barren of all birthing.
Her long hair bundled under a black hat,
her legs curled to her chest.
She watches the road like a sailor,
seeking a shallow or a crest that I may miss.
Or she is alone in herself.
I am not watching the mile markers,
the green signs of passage.
I am not marking the miles.
All Texas towns have names like “Charity”,
as if the graces had a destination,
or “Purity” a residence by a lake.

“Pull over,” she says, and I do, to the shoulder where the clay-like soil splatters
out over the mud-flaps and the road,
and we coast for ten feet,

Out across the land, where in spring I have driven with Gail to see friends,
through acres of bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes and buttercups,
there is actual sage, a twisted tree.
She opens her door and steps slowly down,
gracefully planting her foot in the soil.
I follow suit,
I open my door,
I plant my foot.

“You could have told them,” she says,
“Whatever this is.”
I nod.
“They are always better than we give them credit for being.”
I nod.

This sunset is a cold one, over this land.
My sister is a bundle of grayness,
crossed arms and eyes half-closed.

“We must be halfway there,” she whispers.
“Darkness always means you’re halfway there.”

I sigh and hold my sister to me. She is tense at first, then relaxes
as if she is crying.
she is relieved not to have to speak.

So we stand here by the side of the highway, if only for these minutes.
Like two tattered beings after a sandstorm,
after a clarion of voices.

We will have to go back the miles we have driven,
take off the gloves,
learn to talk in normal tones.
The highway towns will never miss us.
But they were halfway there.

GLS
11.10.92

just a little, now -

2008-06-22T09:47:00.002-07:00

remain in motion, child.
everytime you wake, you will find yourself running again,
so remain in motion.
swim through this
replete with tiny paper birds,
your body an origamic flicker on the sky,
crinkling in search of land,
but don’t look down.
Here, you must believe in flight in order to remain
aloft.
Better this way, kept away from the people you do not create,
the people who can hate and crack you
like a shelled being,
and you know you are not a strong crustacean,
more pea than wall
nutshell.
If you hear him moving beside you, beckoning you with promises of flesh
and the conscious comfort of his arms,
try the howl of denial.
If you fear his breath upon your skin, do not pay it heed, give it credit,
take it as no more than oxygen,
expulsed from his internal skies.
Pray as the light crawl limbed over you that he will love you,
that the melody of dreams will linger long enough to lure him onward,
inward,
asleep,
where an orange and pink laced overhead stays the same,
and swans can burn
or be left in your pocket

GLS
8.3.93

Last name, Middle initial, -

2008-06-22T09:47:00.001-07:00

my childhood is not your childhood,
never could be.
I have memories of churches in the city, with little hidden gardens,
You may not.
So if you keep asking me these questions about now,
how can I answer the way you want?
This is not simple, it is not like I have any insights.

I have lived with snakes in the streets and camels under me,
but I have hung upside down from the monkey-bars of a park,
and ridden my bicycle down suburban lanes to Askew.

I stood in Stonehenge before the fence went up,
and danced in the Haunt to the Sisters of Mercy.

Form me from the dust of your impressions,
add water,
stir.
Yet that golem is not this man,
I lumber in a different gait,
thanks to my cowboy boot fetish,
my laughter,
this eyebrow here.
I’m just going to tell you that I dislike forms,
am a captive to aesthetic beauty,
and have danced alone on the inlet at Gould.

Lucifer means "shining" -

2008-06-22T09:46:00.000-07:00

Onslaught. The only word
for the mode of my conversion.
Darkness
through trees and over curbs,
never paused.
Night
laid its claim. I tried all the ways;
you can’t mask the night as a child.
Your eyes will widen, seeking light,
burdened with a sudden sense of sound,
of ripples and scutters and hissings.
I found laughter is the great ward of fear,
so the night humored me
with dancing bats and presences in space.

Even Arden would understand
why I now think of you at sunset.
He would see the colors seep from my face,
the light pricking a cornea,
a hair along the forearm raised,
details of gradual dormancy.
If you must be away from me,
I will be standing at sunset.

We were ruled by the whim of light.
Our tastes changed in the afternoon,
in the flattering four-o'clock sun:
strawberries and cream cheese on light toast,
darjeeling and mint stems,
that curled with envious grace
along your thumb.
On evenings with halved moons,
it was the bite of wasabi,
and raw fish, slivered on moist rice
as you fumbled with the prospect of our lovemaking.
You expected me to be blonde,
to tangle like a halo in your hands.
I expected your height to shadow me,
following like a humid front.
In our conceit, these pleasures were
emblems, like Miss Kelley's radiant gloves.
We were snow-blind to the literal translation.
Until your leaving.

Then the words became resistant.
Defiant, like a slow Sarandon gaze.
I looked for the kerning in my letters,
as if the spacing between words would break
and open
to some place with a dawn.

But the paper doesn't move.
And licking the stamp, again,
closes something. I have already fallen.
Perhaps this is penance,
or jealousy or greed.
Now I am relying on sound
to reach you,
in fear of all beings who live with foresight.

GLS
4.7.92

reasons -

2008-06-22T09:45:00.004-07:00

1. you found me
2. at times, lost beneath your mouth, ministering
3. wounds I had from others, myself
4. whom above is heavy, solid, a jawbone in the hand, and light like pine
5. clean lined, Scandinavian, clean limbed
6. obvious appreciation of the maleness of my form
7. in the way you moan abstractedly to the pillows in our life
8. sing musicals at bus-stops, annoying
9. canis-blue hued
10. keeping eyes open when we first still kiss
11. “just to watch”
12. the July to now stretch
13. marking the twelve in every month as if some totemic ritual
14. with your allergy of orange and dislike of brown
15. dreaming of sand
16. repeating above
17. your disbelief that lovers would be unkind
18. to me, you digging anchor
19. home
20. because hands held and street kisses are our creation, our claim
21. for once, for all, for selfish reasons
22. your stubble
23. face to face loin-sliding intercourses: again
24. space between
25. the word “us”
26. the nöosphere
27. and “me”

1.27.93
GLS

Saffron and umber -

2008-06-22T09:45:00.003-07:00

You know what I’m talking about.
The grass was this high,
and you could hear the bell,
the clank, the clank
as the brown one moved her head.
Bud-scent actually wafted.
The wind smelled of leaves;
paintbrushed bluebonnets pushed to your lips.
And you loved someone
so perfectly
that you lost all the senses
and the world, in its pain, relied on you.
You removed your shirt to feel the field.
Edges, soil, calf skin, shade,
a rough tongue on your wrist,
rejected as inedible.
The live oak reminded you of what you had done.
Magnolia blossoms, falling across the grove,
laid mosaic on the ground,
and you forgot.
And someone dreamed on a blanket nearby,
they twitched for you
and the darkwing settling on their ankle.
If you were lucky
you laid beside their bare legs
and the cradle of summer was complete.

It always lasts long enough for you to lose it.
Lingers like the earthy veils
of scented skin
and fielded eyes.

GLS
5.7.92

Salvage one -

2008-06-22T09:45:00.001-07:00

He wanted to reach through her skin,
to massage her heart.
Just that, his fingers in her chest and her face turning up
in recognition.
He wanted to remind her
that if he could choose his blood
it would be hers;
they would be sibling.
He thought, mistakenly as men are,
that this would be a good.

“Forget it,” she said in the voice that trapped
like molten lead on moving moths,
“I want you drunk, frightened, all needy.
Needy of me,
only me.
When I hunt you,
you will have no control. No effect.”

He stepped. He knew that she marked time
not by leaves,
not by clock hands,
not by dawns,
because those things were cyclical.
Like the patterns of clouds on the ground,
she would not return.

“I am your dream,” she continued in the voice
of cashmere and rose thorns.
Now he wanted
to leave the boxy wooden room,
to find the rusting iron ties on the tracks outside the window
and drive them further earthward,
down, wet, down,
forcing himself awake.

“So,” he said. And it was his voice..
Exquisite weakness. And he touched her.
She was no longer like ghosts on phone lines.
Moons and grass could rise and fall.
She would simply
be.

GLS
10.12.92

Sister tongue -

2008-06-22T09:44:00.003-07:00

They call it la niña,
“the girl”,
even though they have never seen it.
Rising from those cold waters, hovering in the spheres drifting heedless of continental passageways or
national meanderings, it causes the longest winters this city
has known in years.
From Peru it whispers to the winds,
speaks in a foreign tongue to the temperate drafts,
convincing our Spring to be patient,
to allow this chilling we must survive.
La niña phenomenon.
Like Lauren waking in Virginia,
and deciding that once again she does not have time to call
or write or think
about him today,
and more time passes.
Like Lauren finally calling late one Sunday evening and speaking into the air,
her voice caught in digital pauses
and replayed at his leisure,
later.
Her words spoken in Virginia reach to Illinois and cause
an unexpected coldness,
an anger extended beyond her bounds. Love will do this
with answering machine messages.
Waiting for warmer weather shortens
tempers and lifespans,
waiting for a loved one
only shortens memory.
The next morning is humid as he rises,
so he takes the phone and places
his voice in the air, across the boundaries,
and the anger is filtered over other lands,
until the word
“Hermana ”
settles after the beep.

GLS
4.21.93

Sometimes it's like Timothy -

2008-06-22T09:44:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I catch myself talking to parking lots;
spaces of light and vast concrete,
spaces of no echo.
Or at times I notice the pectoral expansion of my breathing;
the swell of skin beneath fabric,
nipples hardening in the cold.
When counting the empty Diet Coke cans,
the gray cars passed in a day,
the upholstery shedding on the backs of my legs.
These times I find me in new places.
In erections outlined through denim, by fingers.
In pupils like
in the trees.
Under arms, where the smell of moss and bark grows.
Behind ears with the fur of Grover and pelts of ponies.
Over lips like the pressure of rain, bending things to the ground.

Then, like lichen, like monster fur, like sea grass under moving Georgia skies,
he affects my life.

GLS
2.3.92

The tolerance of strange habits -

2008-06-22T09:43:00.001-07:00

The oleander are poison.
I learned that a few days ago,
my grandfather pointed it out,
with his fingers, as gnarled as they have always been,
resting on the bloom.

Oleanders are bright like crimson fingers,
sprays of solid sound: horns.
They were woven into women’s hair
to help announce their arrival.
But chewing on them releases something toxic.
It’s just another example of something beautiful
that’s deadly.

I learned this from Delilah.
She would have loved this place with its hanging Spanish moss;
she could have wandered for months with her shears,
trimming the oaks of their strength without fear of anything
dropping on her head
in retribution.
For on this island, much is tolerated,
as long as the rivers are allowed to find the salty sea,
and the herons can lift from the marshes.

While on a small pontoon,
I reached out for the dolphins in the sound,
skimming their spray with my palm,
getting my hair wet.
I sat back and smiled, knowing that while here,
there was one regret.
We each find our homes eventually.
But we are not allowed to stay.

Sustenance -

2008-06-22T09:42:00.003-07:00

The sky above was riddled with light
as if the cloud-cloth were man-made,
strung then shot by the thousand daily hopes
we generate.
That energy must go somewhere.
Why not up? Why not then?
The cottonwood had shed itself
into the air,
a million drifting promises crossing beams of sunfall,
crossing your sight.
Response?
The rottweiler panted heavily,
pressing herself between our legs,
barely big enough to lift her paws,
old enough to seek
affection, sleep, food.
Grendel muzzled my ankle,
snuffling for attention;
I watched the sky, the motes from the trees.
Her contentment was simpler to fulfill.
Need and desire held no distinction.
Slowly, my fingers moved for you.
They met her nose,
and I looked down.

The sparrow on the tracks struggles
for flight,
tiny contractions of sinew add up
to the lifting and ruffling
he know has known all his life.
The train arrives.
Without touching trail,
I know why he left. It is for the same reason
men quest.

When dogs dream,
we see their twitchings,
their moaning implorations
and we smile.
It must be a rabbit in
some imagined field,
warm food, children, a home.
But what if our pets
dream
deeply.
Seek liquid dispersal at moonlit shores,
run frightened from horses without eyes,
crawl in small spaces in search of air,
find their souls.
I know that labradors cringe at thunder,
that Grendel growls long
at patches of light.

Anchors and wings.
Anchors and wings.
Our souls are always seeking anchors and wings.

You sneezed as a seedlet
caught your nose,
I laughed.
I watched your smile develop
in the patchy light,
moving towards me like your hand.
I would have kissed you,
but Grendel was barking at something,
a finch that had flown from the tracks.

The birth of gravity-

2008-06-22T09:42:00.001-07:00

Kelly never wanted to kill anything.
Now, she gathers her skirt nervously in her hands
as she sits on the floor.
She has already picked at the carpet,
wishing for grass.
She keeps thinking of fireflies in jars.
How their lights go out.
She knows.
She has to leave.
Something in him, therefore,
will, must dim.

Morgan was just penetrated for the
first time.
He kept thinking.
Penis. Penetration. Penultimate. Pendulum.
Pulse.
In sweat and breathing he lay, and
the ground under
the bed under
the building under
his breath,
“pulling.”
Morgan closes his mouth.

It’s August.
During a televised speech,
Mei stands,
vomits.
Across a glass table,
she supports herself, shaking.
Shellfish.
Mei feels delicate, porcelain thin, like
the shells of shrimp,
and sees her eyes in the reflection
on the screen.
His mouth is still moving.
She knows better than to move.

Little stories of recognition. Little.
They are factoring the coefficient of down.
Maybe, they will remember the antecedent,
up.

GLS
9.7.92

the rocking stone -

2008-06-22T09:41:00.000-07:00

You have stepped on something, crumbling,
a memory, a metaphor,
a chunk of this path that has fallen to the side.
You feel it more in pine-needles,
old, sodden, brown, lining the pea-gravel
that trails through the yard.
It is rocking now, gently,
cantering and levering,
first a horse of memory,
then a force for change.

You forgot that there were doves here,
pale like the sky, running through the branches,
and cooing, so like a child.
You know it because the trees have gone gray for the winter,
and the lowlands are filled with the rains,
the lilies finally dormant, markers of Advent.
These are your images of December;
somehow you’d forgotten
the greening of gazebos and the labradors inside.
And this is not where you belong, now,
but this is where your blood resides.

Others would not notice,
this imperfection of cobbling that is more.
But it has tilted your world;
what once was home has changed.
Have you grown heavier with life,
a child’s feet too large to avoid the cracks?
Your mother named things things for you;
the calla-lilies, gardenias, umber walls and damasked fabrics
were birthed from her voice
just as you struggled out from her to breathe
the strange air of northern streets, not southern gardens.
But she did not name the growing,
the vertigo of age,
the imbalance of a rock on the long way home.

GLS
1.2.92

The touch foams -

2008-06-22T09:40:00.002-07:00

You are not the man I wanted.

The moon, when full, can almost read this
in the air, on the beach,
or hear it in our laughter,
our thing of signing,
more witchcraft in flight than humor.
The moon may read this,
but it knows that we are more that steps on sand,
more than absorption
and trails of salted water.

You are comprised of things I never found.

Clocks and kindness;
you have taught me of both.
You wear a watch when you sleep;
are you timing us even in the unconcious?
You forgive my lateness,
either for our dates
or my entry into your life.
So,
I am harnessed to your mortality;
kept by the simple pleasures of your chest,
your Aegaen eyes,
your rage.

You are the man I always deserved.

My perilous lips,
the weapons of your seduction,
my reflective eyes,
the cause of your lure,
seal.
The sounds of that mortality,
heartbeaten, slow panted, mucousy stirring,
keep me here
with dry gritty ankles and chest hairs wavering.

You have become things that I miss.

Kiss me,
though we were not born for each other.

Kiss me,
with your large hands clutched.

Kiss me,
as if the moon watching would harness her tides, prevent time,
and let us pass unscathed.

GLS
10.12.92

These words are your gift-

2008-06-22T09:40:00.001-07:00

You are embarking.
You are leaving.
Yet, this time there is no movement.
Life spins us these ways,
around the dial, along the axis of our mind,
and back again.
But I have always measured my life by cycles,
by water returning
from air to land to stone to sand
to sea,
by the clockwork of people
who always find a way back.
I am learning to live life differently.
To take moments as shadows of clouds
on a sidewalk.
I must enjoy the passing of shadows
as much as the return of favors.

Do not live life by patterns,
the world knows its cycles, they will continue
without you.
But the flow of half-truths told by the tide,
“I am here. I am gone. I will touch you.”,
or the pain
of watching a Texas sky go gold go dark
go away,
these things can be held.
to them, we can apply the word:
cherish.

I know this is a form of release,
that you do not like these lessons,
for they play upon design and control.
Learn this one.
Stand upon the six and force your turning
to stop.
Hold the hands back, force your turning
to stop.
Hold the hands back, link the fingers,
twine them and begin your realization.
Time is not cyclical, it is a line.
Why must we cycle, return to memory, anticipate?
Now the option is ours, to move
outward, away, ever-wider
until, like clouds across the ground
we are cast upon the earth
as we are filled with light
filled with air.

GLS
3.2.93

This heart I have -

2008-06-22T09:39:00.000-07:00

Darling
long from here I will still need you
in the patterns of dreaming and waking in
your gaze, in the pleasure of kissing, even in
these midwinter winds. So take me
in your cradle this night, tell me
something immutable in your so
strong voice. Timbre. Because life
will catch us unawares, toss us like
debris against walls of others, and
Perhaps only this fragile moment will survive,
candle in our collective mind, but that,
that certainly will be enough. Because
I love you. As no other, ever. And I will
teach others of the way I see since you
first touched my neck, and the way I have
learned to breathe because of you. Do
you understand? Listen to my words.
Feel me in the page, glinting like light
on scales underwater, watching, watching.
We were not born for each other, which is
no tragedy, for we found each other, and
that is our gentle, singular, whispered glory.

Window -

2008-06-22T09:37:00.000-07:00

This is the winter of maladjusted winds
and snow that tumbles, then disappears.
Reins keep snapping on short trips,
and things crack like ice underfoot.
I have simply closed my eyes and pressed
my forehead to the pane,
letting frost grow from my mouth as the angels
move inside.
They are tattered, dusted with thought,
and beginning to be doubtful of the gifts they have given.
I suppose I am growing sicker
of missing you.
My fingertips were meant to fall like keys,
distant and tinkling,
but on skin, not ice
that is crawling
along windows.
Outside, the clouds are solid. Empty.
The man at work from Australia has a voice
that stirs the nightmares
of mirrors I made,
of people collecting paper in a yellow room.
So, my dreams break into night in search of hidden skies.
It disturbs the angels inward
to the point that they may speak.
What would they say in this year so sudden,
when you and I had no pause.
This uneasy winter may be the one retreat,
though I can feel lips moving without reverence,
full lips in a hazy amber light,
and winged creatures
watching me.

GLS
3.19.92

Yearn for me -

2007-08-27T20:51:00.000-07:00

With thistles crowned, with eiderdown all bound
up in your pale white mane, your eyes, once blind
as malachite, are splintered to a kind
of gentle, keening radiance, not sound,
but light between the leaves, all green and brown
and gold. You watch me. Laugh, always behind
my back, but softly, wind on waves and mind
full blown with fields of time. Persistent hound,
yet deeper than rich earth, your slumber kept
my trail so fresh, to seek and bind my brow
with signs that now you count my every breath.
How strange that passion grows inside the crypt,
but you would not give love in life, so now
you find the way to yearn for me in death.

Why western is a b stop –

2007-08-27T20:49:00.000-07:00

The husking time again.
Half-holden moons linger over this city in the heat
of August. I think it is this heat, or this movement.
Life moving side to side,
rocking to a heated, golden rhyme,
and I am cutting through,
leaving pieces in the cross-section of space
where I was, and the world is.

The churches are landmarks for me,
breaking the tree-line like mammoths in a veldt of prayers;
I can sight them from the train and know
that I am near.
This is the loneliest time, time,
the time of immense and disturbing silence,
when the sway of an elevated car and the spark of steel and rail
are suddenly symbolic,
but of what,
I do not know.

The husking time again.
Quarter-glow moons are like the stopwatch;
I am moving to a place so rapidly,
that Indian cycles are the only measure,
Indians know that people change like seasons,
if they move like brooks.

I do not look, either, at faces, or into eyes,
unspoken codes allow people the privacy of hermits or saints
when they board;
suddenly, there is no singing, and there is only swaying
of metal on a hurried path.
It makes one wonder if people are worthy of love.

The husking time again.
In darkness from the sky, I am reached.
No bonfires, no flashlights, no beaconing.
I can hear the pieces rushing like leaves on concrete,
clawing to find the one who discarded them.

I cannot smell others,
the lingering of sweat from platform is mine,
this reminds me of each time I change:
when I lose my sense of after-you,
when I lost my sense of touch,
and people blur into uniformity,
and churches rising and floating in trees
are perfect goals,
stone serenity to guide me
past these moons of August,
and this primal need to lose myself.

Where your arm curves into your touch-

2007-08-27T20:48:00.000-07:00

When I tire,
I think of you.

It is like returning to a granite block, barefoot,
to absorb warmth and crouch,
for some time,
with palms supporting a body,
feeling the bulge and the grain.

Violent Prayer –

2007-08-27T20:47:00.002-07:00

And even in this sacred time of ours,
When rain and night sound mix in dark
But silent passages of thought, I am
Afraid of all we said, and swore, and proved.
Do all the things you say reflect my own
Deep, wild, and mixing passions? Even I,
Who yearn for more than that which life
Has given me to taste and feel, do shy
From you and passions swift and turbulent
That somehow you evoke. But how could I,
When fate seemed set, have cut out ties when just
One moment cruelly gave the greatest and
Simplest foundation of my life huge rifts
Of insufficiency. By holding out
One hand, entreating me to join my lips
To skin so sibilant when gliding through
The water, you destroyed my solitude,
The base which formed my life, by giving me
Your love. Could I resist? If I had turned
And left you there, would I have felt the space
In me? The hollow echo of denied
Emotion, which your voice could fill with fugues
Of passion, would have racked my mind at night.
How simply emptied was my reason! Your
Mouth lit, with grace, upon my neck, thereby
Dispelling all objections and the doubt.
I lived but for the moment and for you.
My arms, my eyes, they know your form so well,
But still I am surprised when, each time, we
See change. The way you gasp, the way you move,
The sudden laughter in the room; all new
To arms and eyes in love with you. I pray
In whispers, God hear my loud cry, that we
Will love with purity that solely youth
May give. I fear my lust, yet need our love.
And even in this sacred time of ours,
When, satisfied, we hover near to sleep,
I press your form and shadow close to mine,
And thank the Norns for you, and love: the two
Which bound my heart and set my fear so free.

After the third snows –

2007-08-27T20:47:00.001-07:00

I wait like the lamps in the trees
hanging in the dark breezes of the early Spring,
laced with shadowed branches,
slightly softened fingers of buds and night,
framed by random windows
where watchers, also alone,
keep some random vigil at this time
against the boredom or the fear,
which are both signs of depression,
or so she tells me,
Karen,
the one who has heard
all the stories I have lived
and nodded in her calm and knowing,
letting me know when my narrative
wanders away
with her attention
or from my path, the one I planned, the movement
that I sought and knew
or thought I knew,
or thought I wanted
the way I wanted to wake
with sunlight in green eyes
and to taste fish from seas
and always place the lilies in precisely one way,
so their smell would linger,
fill a room, and thereby
a time;
all desires for things that might
create a memory
that would last to the present,
stationary,
something settled in the
rapid drifting that I do;
so many plans listed
scenes decorated
and words spoked to Karen,
and then I look up
at night
and see them,
hanging in the trees,
like the beacon that you were
and the moment that we became.

GLS
4-29-90
9:29 p.m.

There is no hell in Marella-

2007-08-27T20:46:00.000-07:00

“When you can taste the smoke on his tongue,
sweet beer and felt from a pool table,
you take what you will, submit to what you cannot control,
let him protect.

I like it. In ways it makes me think of the guitar strings.
They played outside my window, in the street,
a trio, I think,
a voice
a guitar
a flute.
Through the crimson screen of bouganvelia,
the painted sky,
I could see their backs.

He does not wish to touch me at times,
and so I wash plates, I eat meat, I smile.
I do things I would never admit to friends.
When he does not wish to touch me,
there is no dark alcove of kisses to make him real,
no humid touch or guitar music.

I tell you this because you are my friend.
I wish I could show you my window,
the childhood view, then you would know,
you would know that it's about
forgiveness.”

The storm and the earthquake have no mind-

2007-08-27T20:45:00.002-07:00

i.

On occasion she will linger
to claw a shell from a tabby wall,
momento of decay skittering in her dusky palm,
down curves of shaded loam where sand and moisture
cling to her feet in green and gray arabesques.

Magdalene died in someone's memory.

Desiring no lover,
save the howling of gulls
and the touch of tide
and scent of forest ponds,
she comes by closing portals
with eyes of broiled orange skin;
hair of musky potpourri rattling in every marsh wind,
stumbling to the waves.

On a shore like this a saint could suffer
and a child could be ignored.
She strips herself of all her mindings,
pushing self into
the brine.

Magdalene laughs through dark slate waters
and returns without collected shells.
Now her hair is
auburn, stranded with flecks of quartz.
And her eyes,
beyond the orange,
if you look, there is lightning.

ii.

Sabina paces the tiled bathroom,
zlocking on blue eyes, common recession,
on hair wet from showers.

She licks a canine in her reflection,
template of her passion's form,
holding tip with tongue
in hope of
blood.

Sabina reincarnates in every embrace.

Men, for her, are laughter
are viscous like her charms,
intoxicants for seconds,
then gone like the toll through echo through streets.

Sabina breathes deeply
of dying orchids and paperwhites
and consequence and probability.
She releases liquid oxygen,
the venom of irrationality,
solvent of bonds.

iii.

Armand is undeveloped. A figure
by a column in a crowded room,
a brow in candlelight and a glint in sun.
Hover. Like scent,
his omnipresence is startling
in introduction.
Is wondrous in simplicity.

Armand justifies the fear of darkness in children.

His collarbone and inner wrist are golden,
painted with lip-marks
like incisions from a sculptor's knife.
Clothing is transparent on his frame,
body aching through fabrics
with voicings of promised
tension.

Armand knows only the torrent of
denial's unburdening.
His mind lingers on the alcohol and electricity
of blood's graveled channel.

iv.

With ruins beside marsh roads,
and the patterns of Spanish moss in the wind;
with the drip of using and the dry of
leavings and the ways of women's escape;
with the patterns of sweat and the
twitchings of implied pain;
I have let them wake me like a throoming in the night.

The February issue-

2007-08-27T20:45:00.001-07:00

This was how I sought MacLaughlin,
positioning myself in window light,
letting him watch,
pulling slowly along the rifts inside.

I stretched along the months,
reaching for the part I thought was him,
past the wheatened and Rolling Rock,
the pre-dawn rowing on the lake,
when his arms would pull and part the surface of Cayuga.

Across a coffee table is the worst way,
but somehow when his lips
and mine
pressed and parted, tongued and moved,
there was an epiphanic saying:
"This, here, now, this is"
and I was blind when he touched my skin.
I tried to bring about
the rush and glory of his smile,
and leave his divided longing in our wake.
This was not his passage.

MacLaughlin was engaged in the Spring.

In October he lamented at a bar,
with his legs touching mine,
and his breath coated with division,
that there were so many choices,
doubled passages gone wrong.
I pressed a bottle in my hand,
feeling liquid inside glass,
wanting only to close my eyes.
Instead, I watched him,
touched his shoulder,
felt the tearing of my rift.

In his sight I felt all
the sunlight in my hair.

GLS
3/12/91

tabitha's world -

2007-08-27T20:44:00.000-07:00

Can you whisper a song to me?
she said as she lowered herself,
but she always asked strange things.

I thought
the world was round
but her peaches were more real
than Columbus.

a name in a book or a hand on an arm
that was a choice.

just eat
and her insistence was like the steady flow of
Atlantic, Pacific, Indian tides.

in a textbook I found her name
just below a "sea"
it was her name (though her parents didn't know)
because I heard her mumble it
every time she planted things.

I thought
the peaches were unusually round
their taste would make her skin a dream
as unreal as Chris had been
when he kissed me over a history
textbook
and I bolted
when she touched me.

the bowl fell and peaches rolled
across her long wooden porch but she smiled
and said we could always plant more
we had a lifetime, didn't we

I'll pick them up, if you sing me a song
and I, the good pupil
remembered the sound of the waves she loved.

Landis Smithers
9-18-90

St. Patrick's steps-

2007-08-27T20:43:00.002-07:00

A primitive soul would be lost here
where identity is a personal thing;
dissolution
in every walked shadow.
A black coat swinging and sunglasses kept
city-glare and wind and eyes from me;
I felt backlit
by a thousand pallid throats.
This Fifth Avenue cathedral,
limestone that summoned my solitude:
that absolute desire
for nimbus
not of flesh, but of space,
a clavicle of mouthed construct.
On that stairway I felt
my pulse, my toes, the surge of fear.
This is
alone.

I was
Christina
in the Wyeth, but
with
cowboy boots and
blue jeans worn
thin by hands
grasping at yellowed stems,
with eyes lifting over grain
to an empty home
and a face lashed by hair.
Trembling, my hand
closed with delicate curls, like husk from kernel,
upon itself.
Amidst taxis pavement rumbling wool from coat horns
pigeon wings -

I aswirl
grassed stillness
and some selfish absolution.

GLS
3/25/91

Something surfacing-

2007-08-27T20:43:00.001-07:00

It is hidden in the magnolias,
which are blooming now as if they have no knowledge.
As if, with texts and words
we should know the way that men think,
anticipate the shiftings of a mood and welcome it,
find the lexicon of pain, and the reference of its healing.
They, at this fragmentary time,
hold the sibilant shape of alphic love,
and dip the branches with the weight of this responsibility,
the honor of their call.

As if passing beneath them, they
laugh their emblamage upon me,
winnowing the light with careless ease upon my shoulders.
I watch a woman walking ahead,
see the colors of her eyes, the swell of skin beneath
a creamy sweater, the aurelole of her nipples
flushed.
I see this as if my hands are the wind.
I see this as if I know her and her ways.
I see this.

it all goes back to the magnolias.
you see, the way they spread and die
their color seeping from their edges like cut wrists,
and their shedding of petals a tease that ends in
death and fertilization.

And it doesn't matter, which way they wilt,
how they blow, all those
words;
they have the option to return in a year.
A woman throws back her long hair,
and stops. She looks down,
balancing on the concrete for a minute.
As if she felt the slow drift of a petal,
heard it brushing the path,
and knew that it was not a fall,
but something breaking into its own element.

This made me falter,
stop, breathe, and turn.
I shy from what will be here, under me, so soon.

GLS
4.27.91

The skin of dolphins –

2007-08-27T20:42:00.002-07:00

I would push my word to you
like paper boats blown over water,
my breath and thought
mingling in some galleon of tension
or a candled skiff of hope
which searched for a landing that would let me
walk
semblanced in happiness, received in joy.

and you would watch me,
ignoring the things I said,
your eyes lingering on my mouth
and the movement of my hands
and the shapes they pressed to the table,
absorbing some essence of me
and waiting for my glance

which came in shock,
swamping the boats I created,
drowning the motions I thought,
as large gray creatures
broke from the water and
leapt out of stillness,
touching me for the first time
as I saw the color of your gaze.

Scythe -

2007-08-27T20:42:00.001-07:00

The way things fall should tell us something,
like the slivered yellow leaves
on the concrete walk,
that, dampened by rain, turned treacherous
and tossed you against me;
a cool shoulder on my chest ,
a warm glance,
an Easter of white gloves.

You fed me sunflower seeds,
fragments of meaty, bitter taste,
a tumble of fingers pressed to lips
spilled grain over my thighs,
and one which fell into my boot,
making me wonder as I walked
if one golden bloom had died to fill the paper bag,
or if a field of shimmering beings had showered the ground
with tiny black bits of themselves
to satisfy your hunger.

Landis
nov 2, 1990

A prayer for the family -

2007-08-27T20:41:00.001-07:00

Lord, let us move with grace through this world of endings.
Teach us to listen;
for you rest in silence,
though you move in conversation,
hidden by the spoken word.
Teach us to comfort before wounding;
it is in the touching of others
that humanity begins.
Teach us the way to hold loved ones;
even as we allow their slow growth away.
Keep in us a faith in Change;
for from it we are forged,
in it we are tempered into one.
Yet keep in us this stillness,
this center of knowing,
where forged,
in it we are tempered into one.
Yet keep in us this stillness,
this center of knowing,
where our love brings You pleasure,
and in You we are whole.

Amen.

No fear, McLaughlin-

2007-08-27T20:40:00.000-07:00

At times,
conversations are measured not by words,
those uttered strung vowels,
but by the pauses in sound, tensile silences.
These are the harmonies of our attraction;
exquisite, pristine, balanced.

In the smell of your sweater as I lift it,
beaded by late summer fog,
damp cotton, woven blonde
where I pressed my head to your breast,
these speeches of you billow in my inner ear
with the inflection of sheets and snap of your slight accent.

I am frustrated by your abstract designs,
not drawn, but walked through my life with details:
signs on notebook covers,
a Walkman with no volume control,
a copy of “The Rainbow”
with no cover,
your constant, gentle, humming,
no lyrics, and much denial.
I fascinate you with inherent shock value,
rumbling your conventions until you must laugh,
or submit to the need to touch me.

Will either prove that I am real?

You watch my fingers reaching for a branch,
or my lips moving over a Franciscan prayer,
my legs curled around a barstool,
simple indulgences that remind you
of your still rooms
devoid of my voice and the warmth of my skin.

When you draw breath,
I need strength to resist you, John.
Don't you see the rapture you bring
when you descend upon me from your silent plane?
I am responding to imagined arms, almost drawn skyward,
when your breath moves through my name.

GLS
8.3.91

Never having seen Guilin-

2007-08-27T20:39:00.000-07:00

Someone, perhaps my mother,
or some other lovely blond,
told me
that if you didn't eat it all,
it wouldn't come true.

And I thought:
"How nice
that for once I can truly choose my destiny;
how considerate that it all hangs
on my appetite."

But I found that I didn't like
the taste of flour and manifest destiny.
Something about eating "control"
in order to summon a saying
into
existence.
I'd much prefer a form
of fortune fruit pie,
where the opening reveals only
sweetened syrups,
and the only revelation
is that nothing on the inside
is real.

GLS
5.12.91

The natural order-

2007-08-27T20:38:00.002-07:00

I never knew that he could dance,
this man who stood before affection
as if before a lash.
I had perhaps scorned him
in his flashing rages over hinges
or his witherings under mother's gaze.
Though he gathered us in family
and led us across continents,
though he was trite authority
and gifts from airport news stands,
I kept looking for a weight
beyond a candy bar at nine o'clock.

The Carolinan hills that pushed him
from East 82nd to Cedar Creek
could not foretell a thing to his child.
The patterns of the razorblade
when he removed his beard
left no message of import.
Even the scents of morning kisses,
replete with light like smoke,
were no more than semaphores
of wool and Polo cologne,
obscuring my sensual gathering.

But I was choked with a son's fear
when I first saw him dance,
as certitude and grace finally
took this man above me
and hid him from all words.

2/10/91
GLS

movement through the leaves –

2007-08-27T20:38:00.001-07:00

God will grant me this time
after the magnolias have died beneath the bell-tower,
to walk the shadows of the Quad,
listening for the sibilance of June's arriving.
These walks have drummed a solitude around my open soul,
like lessons in the classrooms,
like dreams that recur.
The world, life,
finds ways to touch you,
new ways of wounding when you think
you are deserved
of this stillness from bird-wings
this absence of light.
To walk these wide paths,
to move below the arched windows,
and Ionic columns,
there are echoes of Dendur in the Metropolitan mid-day,
wrappings of Wendy's laughter as she tilted over my note,
and I paid for this and these
in separation.

Wrought iron lamps rising from cold stone,
cold stone arched above gorges,
where students have ended their lives in long spirals,
where foam and full moons
welcomed Courtney and Cecil and I,
stroking across the slate.
Past. Past like the devolution of ice.
Now the greens are layered, pressed
upon and leafed, black with
scales and glimmers - lush rustlings of a new wind.
I can smell the moisture,
taste it in my bare feet, and my underarms.
In this silence I can say anything,
so I breathe, just.

I walk naked on a plot,
bounded by hovering rooms where I learned the stories
I tell myself, and live others.

There is no tempo of similarity to the caroling of birds,
and echo of welcome,
announcing the Eden coming
in the blue behind Sage Chapel, the sloping of roof and dawn.
Here, place, so very much laughter
with Matthew,
the humming of sun on Karen's pale Irish skin.
All of this, from aerate pressures on my nudity
bird-voices layering like the intensity of leaves on my eyes,
moisture calling my skin,
calling like oceans in the trees,
washing the sky before the light,
warning of betrayal of the loss.

Airié has told me
people see me as strong,
but that the world wounds certain people,
wounds them a lot.
Does she know that these people
have taught,
that this place has loved,
that this final dawn,
spoken in the language least studied,
is my sensory goodbye.

GLS
6.13.91

Lullaby-

2007-08-27T20:37:00.002-07:00

Icons flock my dreams,
grazings of memory with eyes
that pool and dry
like fading chords:
Philip's warms chest surfaces against mine,
sheltering voice and lips on my shoulder;
owls in bathtubs,
claw-footed porcelain vessels,
coppered eyes and talons ruffled
into my arm.

This is why I do not like sleep;
it takes and presses like a murderer
through concious moments
with desire
for gritty foam on feet,
with fear
of being voiceless.
Sleep denies my reality;
plagues of need scrape my lips at night,
moans heard by curtains,
gauzy sounds
from batallions of lost conversations.

Each day opens
with longing for the night.

There, terrors were bred to my taste.
There, Philip holds me on streets,
my forehead dipping
to his murmurs.
There, Beverley and I sleep
under the winter mimosa,
wombing each other
as branches web the scrim of stars.

Not allowed to leave,
I wake, wrestling
with unattainable images of comfort
and Ithaca's April snows.

GLS
4.2.91

Lost on the driveway -

2007-08-27T20:37:00.001-07:00

This life is filled with Juicy Fruit jingles,
with other people's babies,
with dance mixes, rebates,
statistics that always rise,
and then,
there is the rainfall on gravel.

It comes surprisingly soft.

To the senses it is most aural,
a metallic slate color,
but a veil of sound.
Sheer glamour of loss,
water on stone and somehow, the mind,
it leaves.
To lift the eye and thought from this hissing tympany
would be cause for death.

So I need a prayer now,
as I struggle with this calm.

Returning to the noises is when I need you, Lauren.
It is your turn to redeem.
My sister must save me,
barefoot the wet gravel and speak me from the loathing,
the denial of the rain.
If there is a way through the world to where I am,
you will find it.
And if you remember the way,
you will lead me.
Or we will remain, or we will die.

GLS
10.16.91

Inisheer, beyond the edge-

2007-08-27T20:36:00.002-07:00

Airié knows
that we rely too much
on vapor from coffee mugs
to tell of the cold.
She turns to strangers
for their omnipresence,
finding her comfort in her being alone.
And all of our holding hands in
dark parking lots
and through crowded hallways
proves nothing except the reflex of muscle and heart.
I watch her eyes for more,
seeking a telling wince,
but Airié keeps pointing out my moods.

Writers are annoying in that way.

She analyzes rings on tables,
and speculates on belts and jeans,
and keeps avoiding mirrors and still, open puddles.
I know that she seeks islands,
shrouded by heather and the smell of sheep,
and hungers for the magic of a ship
and storms that blow like reason over seas.
She, like I, would discard the sunsets
that we finds so frightening,
and all the unease of the dawn.

So we order from a catalog:
a sweater in gourd, leggings in cranberry, a scarf of chiffon
the color of shaded leaves
after a rain.
She laughs at some expression I make;
I have tried to draw her fingers on the form.
The next day we buy the requisite stamp,
lift the letter,
and wait.

2/14/91
GLS

Immersion was a moment-

2007-08-27T20:36:00.001-07:00

So, the waters still, and then they die.
I do not think that they care, they move without emotion,
the inanimate in this world do not feel.
I can beat against water,
slamming fist or open palm against
a pond, a puddle, a surface without substance,
there is no pain.
Liquid knows no tensile lasting,
it knows no burning,
it just moves.

Escape comes simply,
through evaporation, lifting,
scattering to particle and stratosphere,
through branch and fingers and grass and skin,
water lifts as if winged;
in the end we are all embalmed of moisture.

Without it, there are things that wither,
ground that splits and pales,
mouths left open,
spilling more of life onto busy city pavement.

She should have told me that her leaving
would bring the thirst.
Before she ran down rivulets, moving in glacial slowness
to meet the vast expanse of anonymity
known only and best
by those who seek her kind.

GLS
6.18.91

First mournings-

2007-08-27T20:35:00.000-07:00

You spoke of David, and the way he breathed,
so I turned up the volume;
there were crop reports on the radio,
when I wanted Pagannini in the air.
You opened windows and turned on fans,
as if to dispel the scent,
but he will be here like weather,
a stifling heat, a lulling rain.

"He's too close, he's too close."

"He left, he's . . . it's quiet in here, isn't it?"

When you spoke, you forgot
who loved him best.

GLS
7.22.91

Far from troublesome creek-

2007-08-27T20:34:00.002-07:00

How do you measure the sand in your life,
as it slides into cracks in your skin?
The dunes of St. Simons keep on returning,
rumbling through dreams like bison in bed.
To think of him was like entering
rooms filled with sunlight,
spattered by dropcloths
and motes in the air.
I ran to the island and walked the long tide-bars
made where two rivers slept with the sea.
Buried in music from the green jam-box
and the dancing sand and the howling gulls,
I lay still and let the sun's burning find me,
to furrow out the thoughts and force me to breathe.
At nights when the Southern moon
hung over the marshes,
and crowded the fiddler crabs out of their dens,
I rode Paintbrush without
English saddle
until the glint of Jeckyll appeared in the bay.
I did these things which
did not mean
snowfall
or chalkboards or big hands or jackets
with stripes,
because in the lowlands of Georgia
by moonlight,
no one rowed sculls, and no one would write
of green eyes closing under my fingers,
or shoulders that quivered in fear at my touch.
This was the gifting of that small island,
which found me and forced me
to keep this alive.

2/06/91
GLS

Excision and coercion -

2007-08-27T20:34:00.001-07:00

Lauren watches my lips as we eat;
she has told me
that they are treacherously lovely
for a brother to own.

I have written to her on thick red paper,
sinking the letters beneath some skin,
forcing myself not to say things;
neglecting to define.
I know that they are difficult to read.
I have to turn on lights to find myself
behind the lectures and the thoughts.

In a lecture on development I saw her nursery.
She slept beneath the gaze of pandas,
who, pieced by color and two feet high,
crawled through painted bamboo,
cloning around her crib.
I memorized her name,
made it a child's mantra,
when crossing the street to see her for the first time.
I did not want to age and then forget;
I knew that I would say it
often in my life.

Lauren.

Now see her in red sheaths,
pressed against young men,
leaning on their egos and their fear.
I have the sense of empty nurseries,
of crawling, crying pandas,
of someone wearing lipstick,
and her stride approaching mine.
Against the brush of ink and postal time
I want to say,
"Lauren, I never told you

GLS
3/12/91

Embraces find their own -

2007-08-27T20:33:00.002-07:00

You shouldn't leave me now,
when I'm so close to the understanding.
Here, with candles growing old,
patina around the silver vines,
I am beginning to notice the snow,
and how it waits.
There is only warmth beneath layers;
earth knows this:
it inhumanly welcomes the cold,
allowing accumulation to bring slumber.
Is this why you have accepted
my sudden threats of leaving
with such calm?
Are you certain that I will learn
to equate time's passage
with contentment,
not loss?

I should not be allowed to stand outside.
Alone amidst the whispering banks
and flurries of descent and sleeping ground
there are promises of purity.
Hints of death. Transformation of a whole.
A place of confusion to battle a certainty.

But it is only a snowfall.
A snowfall where we walked in summer.
A snowfall where you took me.
A snowfall finding its place on earth,
somewhere,
between us.

GLS
12.8.91

As we looked steadfastly on him-

2007-08-27T20:33:00.001-07:00

The headstones did not grow here,
they look nothing like pale mushrooms,
they were deliberate place-settings,
identifying implants in this garden.
We walk through the wrought-iron gates
to the marshy light and snapping limbs,
rustling hydrangea and blooming paperwhites
and the sudden cherubims of stone.
I am afraid of tripping.
Over my name, or that of a loved one,
or the silence of these melting marble words.
Arden, Leila, Jonathan, Maggie,
beloved, only, cherished, first,
died, departed, gone, left,
perhaps to somewhere greater than this soul-strewn yard.
But there are clusters of mulch and leaves
as fragrant as orchids,
and light like a lover’s touch
on the ground.
“This place needs a well,” you say,
”One with no bucket, one with no string.”
There is a pause, as if there should be a flight of doves,
the slow rise of a crane overhead,
some creature leaving this place.

I want to hold you,
feel some pulse beyond my own, hear it, know.

Some need for sound.

“We saw his face as it had been the face of an angel,” I read.
And it is graying, lichened, plain,
but I touch it,
and shadows spread from my fingers, leaking to the ground.
I feel you behind me, and under me,
around me in shadow and scent,
and my thoughts are as obscene
as the desire to bury angels.

GLS
7.24.91

Appointment on the lawn-

2007-08-27T20:32:00.002-07:00

Bruised fingertips from sifting so many pebbles;
dip into beds, dip through water, dip through stone
and touch.
Marshall lost his wife,
and told his grandson how
he cried his eyes out when they left,
finally. What if there were headstones
waiting on the lawn?
To mark time or to enjoy life,
a Kannapolis home,
distance of a life behind,
sudden freedom, a flurry of wingbeats.
We do not expect this,
this is far from liberation,
this is so far from responsibility.
It is forced retrospection.
Photos, curtains, green couches, kitchens with no movement.
Grand-children.
He never learned piano, but he can restore
a Packard, a Volvo.
Where is everyone?
Laughter seems tiresome
because laughter seems lost.
He had signed up with the Lord,
and hoped
for an option to renew.
He had chosen and paid for her casket.
In two Saturdays,
there was a reunion of his high-school class,
which he would miss
for another touchstone.
Would there be sun on the blanket of grass,
lapping around her,
shadowing the crevasse of her name?
This copious silence.
Wrinkled fingers,
as if caught in a tub for hours,
but dry,
ball up the linen napkins
as if she will scold him.
Colored stones in a glass bowl,
sorted by size,
sifted by the colors of Myrtle Beach,
coated in ash.
Perhaps another rose garden,
blooms under touch and hazy eyes,
before the settling
of dust through the slanted light.

GLS
4.5.91

Almost drowning-

2007-08-27T20:32:00.001-07:00

She was spined like origami,
crackling and unfolding into cygnets, cicadas, cirramunds,
things unnamed that ate from the surface of ponds,
then flew.
Caroline could walk through rooms of glass:
bowls and candle-sticks,
table-tops, shelves, columns,
bulbs,
and her harmonics quivered the grain.
Crystal strained to follow,
searched for fault in clear lines,
aching to be touched by one woman's hand.
A turn of her shoulder,
a slip of a white blouse,
they were not the ripplings of tendons
and human blood,
they were the preliminary splinterings
of cartilage,
of her will.
Arias of unhappiness, of growings, screamings,
and rooms falling from dusk to dusk,
these clustered in her shoulder,
and will shatter
all transparent objects to
a haze of opaque dust.

Here is Caroline turning in a room of folds and angles,
before she leaves;
a woman mouthing "forever"
as if it once were personal.

She will break the glass in the frames,
and the bottle, tinted green, will scent of vinegar and cork
as it shards the carpet.
But not with hands,
with movement,
with her internal window splintering,
outward,
away

Caroline breathing air.

the competence of loss –

2007-08-27T20:31:00.000-07:00

He lost himself in tiny moments;
the color of my hair,
the way my lips would part then,
the pollen on my cheek.
I think he was my suffocation;
for him I abandoned life
and dropped the centers of religion,
and truths told to parents.
He spoke to me like a windhover
and pierced angels fled his eyes
as I reached for him in those mornings
of persimmoned light.
The Jesuits spoke of cannibals
who stand in velvet pews,
of logarithms, similes, and minds like windows,
but all I wanted
was something like a goblet,
made of clay, set with stone,
something like his skin
to shatter.
Lilies bloomed upon his cuff.
So every door I closed
I saw him down long porches,
lit by dusk,
legs spread like rails and eyes closed.

This month I had trouble breathing
in a waiting room.
It had to do with tension,
and closed doors and beige,
but I couldn't see him
in the reflected skyline
or hear him in the air-ducts.
I almost forgot his name.
I left and searched
for a confessional,
or a clean coffee-counter,
but bought flowers like tapestries,
petals pressed in books
or set in glass and ice
to darken and die
on carpets
or between words.

GLS
2/26/91

The blood of strong women

2007-08-27T20:30:00.000-07:00

i.

I live in constant awareness of
their eyes.
No matter the number of men I embrace,
the amount of time I am absent,
the times I re-cast myself,
they remain,
silent until evoked
and primal in their forceful claim upon my
limbs and tendons and cartilage;
they course past my defenses and escapes,
ignoring experience and change,
soundlessly pooling,
stilling,
making their presence known.

They are a pantheon faceted with different lives,
yet in laughter they become, descendently,
one.

ii. gemini

if I whisper names to flowing streams
I know that you will come with beauty
fresh like the burst of a cold grape's skin
gushing like blood from a pierced vein
and growing with tidal insistence

you whom I wait to age, so you know the sweet flutter
of Autumn and long mossy roads
and the scent of the dead gardenias in the Bible
high on a shelf,
will bring pleasure and memories of
mother's untended garden
rather than discontent and straining fingers.

no men in your life -
keep them to yourself and private memories,
as I keep the thoughts of throats tensed beneath
my kiss away from your mind,
for our love is one of jealousy and stolen
moments, and letters in wooden boxes
and laughter and silent talks.

know the severe comfort of isolation after anger;
it will make you so strong,
prepared for
chilled Chardonnay and green apples on
porches and the long loss of home.
I want us to age together, to wander for
sand-dollars on Ghoul's Inlet,
link arms in the silence of Episcopal graveyards
strewn with live oaks and Spanish moss
and close our eyes against the
strong marsh breezes which our grandparents
gave us forever,
where sandpipers and gray-backed porpoise
and deep-fried shrimp on white plates
taught us
before I left and you became
lovely as the tidal plain.

when I go farther
to cities and hardship and joy
a part of me will remain
whispering to blonding streams,
waiting to walk with you,
away from all the undefined, unforeseen,
unforgiveable, unalterable, unbound
wonder of all
which keeps us apart.

iii. gaea

she
waited with me, stroking
my arm until I faded into sleep, taking
her smell and presence with me into dreams,
quilted in the white walls and turning fans
of her home
where the lizards with their yellow throats
were allowed indoors,
and every Christmas was balmy with the call
of the honey bird in the bouganvelia.

her
face is like the sea around her coastal home,
bonding the beauty of youth and the troubles of life
in a plane rippled by thought, laughter, and the twists of honesty,
reflecting the light of day,
whispering in the moonlight,
luring onward.

she
would hum as I lay
my head upon her breast;
a sound low and wandering,
some tune that was never and ever the same,
as if the tolling of bells and the drone of wings
washed through her lungs
and drew me into comfort.

her
burdens seemed enormous, though
self-imposed, some unquenched need
to satisfy those whom she called her own, those
she created, those who carried her
clear blue eyes and staggering devotion in
every breathing moment,
and I wonder how insignificant
our loyalty seems beside hers,
how can I be swarmed by this woman,
who gave pulse to a lineage,
and birthed in me
an emotion so evasive of definition?

iv. gabriel

space

you fill the distances I make for myself,
reaching from your seasonal lawns,
from the wild roses outside my first window in Houston,
from the poolside gardenias on Taylorcrest Court,
from the calla-lilies in our swamp,
from the hibiscus of your mother's home,
reaching past the Asian orchids I put in glass bowls,
not with memory, or guilt, or right,
but our blessed bond,
our genetic similarity
which lets me live your thoughts as you dream
my realities.

As I swam that Saturday, as the rain
battered the pool and thunder shook the gazebo,
and the sun lit the lawn,
As you stood on the porch in the southern storm,
and watched me,
but refused to join me, I
knew how we would always understand
yet never reach our deserved equilibrium.

"remember," you said,
and the January dawning was humid,
"because this is a new decade"
and I stared at the brown grasses,
and my eyes were lifted by the red
of the ribbons
your hands had tied to the the iron lamps
beside which your friends would linger
with champagne and chimes from the
tall wooden clock,
and ten years of life would unfurl from those
memorized red ribbons.

you brought the animals to us,
summoning the hamsters who vanished into our walls
and lop-eared hares,
gray as overcast skies, named for Francis, the saint,
and our dark cherubs,
your lolling, gorgeous, canine angels,
who guarded our home and hearts,
bringing you the companionship that
my leaving denied you.
they taught me the possibility of man envying dog.

even our tales are intangible,
shifting pieces of two lives commingled,
where one and one make one,
and the word
is immutable in time and

v.

all I can do is welcome them.

they will bring gifts: plastic shorts
seashells
stained glass panes
country music
sun-strewn marshes
copper pots
Russian icons
and perfect fruit pies topped with light meringue or apricot glazes,
these intravenous sustenances for their favored one,
their gradual wanderer,
who grasps at crucifixes and southern accents,
at the exotic and the insane,
knowing the tidal quality of blood;
but fearing the shores
it may wash away.

Broken from a part of a Northern blue sky-

2007-08-27T20:29:00.000-07:00

I will place the summer of watercolors
as the last time when I was truly safe.
As a child with my hand in Nana's
trusting to be taken, not led,
I walked to places where she would hum against me,
cradle me when I was tired,
and blend the world into bright, simple hues;
coral reefs and lizards,
salt in the air.
I picked branches from the ground,
and, as instructed, dipped them in ink jars,
scratched the paper,
and watched masts and warning signs of deep water
blow on the paper,
jagged and smeared by hand and dead wood, blotches of blue.

The color that followed was not brown for bark and green for leaves,
and that was why I learned.
Nana had purple forests lining sand-crabbed marshes,
and crimson running through the inlets of the sound,
vermillion sails on the coasts of Georgia.
I saw the life flourishing around me as I do now:
hued and spectred by the soft wash of paints.

Children color as they love,
with generosity and disregard for lines,
and that watercolored summer was marked
by soft rains on a pier which speckled the boats,
and by sand that was blue,
running from her hands across the tops of my feet,
gentle and wet and soft;

the color of her eternal eyes.

GLS
9.9.91

Comments upon scattering -

2007-08-27T20:06:00.000-07:00

my mother taught me thievery:
the way of taking without others knowing.

the silver pitcher from Galatoire's
crawled into her purse between coffee and the check
and glints on my shelf.
A New Orleans evening is caught in the silver,
and where the cream used to flow I can see
the swirl of her white skirt as she crossed Bourbon Street.
Tinted the color of wide Houston skies
it shimmers the shade of walls
she painted when I was young.
It's handle
is the curve of my first lover's shoulder
who now is as parceled
as her favors once were.

So I wonder as I keep collecting
where has she hidden
the myriad of things she has taken from my hands?
The hedges in London where I hid from the rain
and the gray Moroccan robe shielding me from the sun
are covered by the shading of green in her eyes.
And the stuffed security of Sherman,
the tattered felt dog,
is muted like the pain of my one high school love
by the wondrous envelopment of her
signature perfume
as she crossed through the kitchen and out onto the lawn.

But these cruelties are moments;
just objects in my mind.
I see that her greatest theft of all
was stolen as it was given:
a son's first stumbled leaving,
printed like the silver
by her gleaning fingertips.

2/5/91
GLS