Ghostdancing

When morning, you are nothing, 

The sun too obvious in its intention 

That your body should bear scars 

Deeply marked by the shadow of the world. 

Better when you are softened by gray. 

Great beasts of weight and importance, 

They must be so, as the prism only manages 

To briefly break their form 

Now and again, a sliver of silver 

A diamond found and lost  

Within the black of your eyes. 

I stretch my splintered winter branches 

Toward a perfect alabaster landscape, 

Touch the dull lope of dunes courting your waist 

And the deep chasm of your river red 

Filled with songs that haunt me still. 

Your island, your song. 

But you are also the tide  

And I move imperceptibly, 

A coin reflected in your body, 

Cast but impermanent, 

Wavering at the wages of your motion. 

Did you move when I whispered? 

Did you rise and swell with me 

As my own dark waters mixed 

With your flawless ocean green? 

Tell me but don’t. 

I’m better just imagining. 

Don’t speak of those things  

We once were before 

When we cradled the echo of  

The black between stars, 

We architects of our deconstruction;

Ashes we wear and in ashes we wake. 

If the first light breaking severs the blackout 

And what we have made. 

At night I hold you, 

Your permanence, elusive.

Alive and burning,

Pitched against the threat  

Looming on our eastern shore. 

You are full and I am taken 

From beyond the words I wear, 

Beyond these walls, apparent as armor. 

At night I hold you 

And trace your invisible lines 

As you dance a gentle finger 

Across the narrow of my spine. 

I’ll promise you these things, forever and blue 

As your wind rises up to meet me, 

A shroud against the cold, 

Your wind rising, your warmth; 

And I am forever and forever yours. 

Ask Me Again.

I’d create a universe in a stairway
scale poles and slide on telephone wires
to fill your sky with stars
that choose not to empty or expire.

I think I may be lost on Eliot
wondering where my Ezra’s gotten to again
caught in the wasteland we’d presume
(perhaps she’s even been consumed).

I’d sit you down, TSE;
And we’d discuss over coffee, over tea
I’d try to explain to you
the limits of the sea.

You know me well enough by now, you’d know
What I’d risk for certain half deserted streets
to be able to relate to you the ocean that lives
within a body warm, on pale linen sheets

How white makes a serpent’s shape
that curls around ankles, around thighs
around the lines we’d name as heaven
if ever we’d been afforded anything like time.

We’re foolish in seeking claims
upon a siren’s song;
we’re nothing but acrobats
and we might be wrong.

The voice is enough, you understand?
if it approximates the merit of the ocean
and the sea that but in dreams
we dare attempt to touch.