The Red Lacquered Box

Christ’s words are crimson
As your paper curls
That spill, quilling
On your opaline neck,
Cathedralled unabashed
In velvet azure.

Milk-glass, you daub
Jeweled fingers into
The marble font,
Coolly ruffling some pool in me.

My mouth, my craft
Is too small to ride
The river that is rising.

The cloth of me too rude
To glide with your satin
Through woodruff and violets,
To trace your eyelets and taste
the warm cakes of coriander
and orange.

I duck behind shadows, edges,
Catching fast my breath
That I might be graced
With the red lacquered box
Of your lips exposing
Such roses . . . . Such roses . . . .

A breeze runs streamlike, spiraling


Palms trace columns,

Sea-washed pylons

Lost so far inland,

Fossiled kelp & acrita-mottled,

Here encircled

Under lindens and solemn birch trees


Hilazon warbler,

You limn brackish manuscripts

And I catch only fringes,

Iridescent distrails~~

Your comings and goings

Through the ether,

The altocumulus featherbeds

You ruffle aloft.


Away, away

Cold rains come

Grey blurring.

Through sleep-smeared fieldglasses I spy you~~

Smiling and languishing,

Turned in and out.

Are those your lips,

Your words,

Salted blue through time?


Come sing to me

Long chains

Of rhyme.

Come sing to me

And untie

The places where I keep drawing lines,

In sands, in skies,

Through hearts and parts.

Bring your hand

And warmly twine with mine

And let us softly

rub them out


over time.

Dill & Hollyhocks

Dill & Hollyhocks
You come with the sun.
Waning rift of moon mists
Disperse in your wake.
Red-rimmed, the enamel dipper
You tender aqueous,
Gifts my lips truly
Overflowing.

In this light, I crimson warm,
I strawberry fan on your tan
Melon belly.
Swinging open, the gatefold
Welcome of your smile
Is where I hang mine.
Your generous hands &
Your tongue slowly
Catch my drowsing heart.




~~~~~~~

Inaccessable Areas Exist

INACCESSIBLE AREAS EXIST



I feel the pull of the lowering call

As the tide comes and the fog fills in.

The verdant bloom,

The coral orange and pinks of sky and land

Now blanketed with grey flannel

That wools over unfolded

From the cedar chest

As summer ebbs.



An abalone in a pail

So large and lonely and muted

In its galvanized prison.

Years of tiles labored on.

Bricks mortared up in ardent diligence

Hiding the iridescent glory,

Heaven's own light.

Hauled from its home

Sublittoral

By an eager boy who works up the slope

Bright and whistling

Through the serpentine,

The outcrops above the ocean

Where the Mendocino cypress barely cling,

Closed-coned and bending.



A flycatcher lifts and flits

Startled

With a quick trilling cry.

So small and then gone

To redwoods high.

Oh, grey-green passerine

Take me with you

On your little barred wings~~

While in rooms below

Buried in the black and white of night,

Ruby slippers gleam

And lustrous sheets glacier up,

Then lushly flow.




~~~~~~~~~

Atlantis

ATLANTIS


The flame I lick

Deepens as it flickers.


I consume whole towns,

Bricks and bridges.


Cloisonné paisleys

Hennaed with Sanskrit


Bead games and barnacles

Threaded with fishnet


Microfiche petticoats

Silica sparked and frayed.


I would take a lifetime,

Lost,

To explain.






~~~~~~~~~

In acquiescence

In acquiescence


Your once fluent saltine sleeve,
Now strangely inarticulate,
Thinly swathes the chair
Just there where the wild ginger
And rosemary fades in the air.

Your eyes close a moment
And I lean in to breathe your honey skin,
But I feel hot tears starting,
Tapering out of me~~
One dripping drop
& you will disappear

A friable onionskin kiss
And gone.
Recalling Shiitake on my tongue,
The buff pleats of your umami
Still unnamed, unknown.

Wood-lorn, I wait on the slope
Where the creek spumes frizzante.
Hands folded until the cream-crescent moons
Of my thumbs adjoin.
I sigh.
My thoughts carom off grey rocks
Falling finally upon a small upturned
Smile of a stone.
And I reflect upon it until the stream
Flows back to where you come~~
Your soft approach,
Your gentle love
Which so lightly rests on my shoulders,
Chirring.

There, where the dun grass mats down,
I reach around your trunk,
Your flinty shagbark,
And feel the warm sharp pant
Of the hart, antler-bound,
Strung up in moss branches,
In acquiescence hanging,

Slowly, slowly
Exhaling.




~~~~~~~~~~~

Rowboat

Mesmerized by the lustrous glittering beads,

the sweat on your upper lip,

damselflies alight and rise again,

spiral in a haze,

haloing~~blue green grey.

You keep rowing.

I'm handling diamond-backed snakes

and speaking in tongues to the sun.

You keep spitting out problems,

tricky equations.

Tell me Tell me Tell me

What’s the sum?

I’m trying to reach out, to get there.

Between incessant strokes,

I screw up my eyes to a blackboard,

but decimal points are fluid,

pages in a magazine, fragrant ink motes.

Backwards floating,

Catalpa brushes my neck

and I remember how to breathe

out loud.

Unlocked, your yellow pine wrists

and your green apple pulse twist

through me.  Your sorghum kiss

Drips into my heart

Which opens,

Fluttering.