_I will slip between the two rocks
that gate my darkened sepulcher
past the daylight and into the woods,
not to flee my mortality
but into pine trees, into their roots.
I will nourish them
and pulse through their woody arteries
and out their needles in green and resinous light.
Thus my corpse grows fragrant.
While walking you will note me
though you do not know my name.

_They are not as fragile as she expects.
Most survive, burst from the trunks by summer.
They speak, she makes promises,
Strokes their glossy skin on the lower branches.
The days shorten. The rustling is constant.
Each hour there are new shapes to gather, kiss,
Place between tissue in plastic boxes.
The scrape of a nearby rake is maddening.
By November she is frantic,
Tiptoes over the lawn in slippers,
Stacks boxes high in the rooms of her house,
Papers the walls in yellow maple.
In the last days she shakes,
Doesn’t sleep, treks in and out of the doorway.
Once the door is locked she breathes deeply,
Chooses the strong ones,
Finds an empty space on the rug.
It is difficult to tie the stems. The result is dazzling.
They respond as she settles, bare-limbed,
Beneath the patchwork. For a long while,
No one is disturbed.

_North of Duluth, I muse, mentally drooling

Over lake-shrouded woods,

Jotting scribbled notes and

Fumbling with my camera lens,


Then I spot the enormous moose.

_It is easy to forget
summer grass
in November
as we ran through it
untangling it
or was it left tangled
after we, us
in a delicious scent
of "we shall never die."

_
Winds toss foliage in air.
Birds bend against frost
their wings catching the
last sunlight.  

In cosmic dance snowflakes
light up evening.
Diminutive
galaxies circling abandoned gardens.   

We hunch our shoulders with winter.
Our shadows are long now.

_
Vain Reunion

She tried to restore
the top half of him
once filled
to the brim
with her.
In the end,
they walked out
a couple of
talking heads
denied the cracked cup
of the body,
but still slept
in separate beds.


Manhattan Oddballs

The affair progresses in three-chord structure:

what I want, what you want, what we never get.

They consider having sex on a rooftop

 or in the mysterious city rain.

 He likes his listening to Morphine Flush,

 a thrash metal band from the late 90s.

She likes hers without a trace.

 They argue, they gulp, they squeal,

they flinch, they prop open their tongue-tied lives,

 they scorn undercooked Peking Duck,

 they chafe at the elbow,

 they sex-whine while his dog barks,

they fall away during post-grunge anti-climax.

_Hands embrace each other, slide through on another
Like raw, wet fish still shivering with death.
In unison they flop, up down, clinging mannerly apathetic,
Then separate, parted by the tide of time. 

 

 

_ Look mother,
I peeled away your anger
and stopped building
sand castles
by the sea.
The nation
is riddled with thieves
and no door opens easily.
My childish dreams?
Fulfilled, and laid to rest.

_Rain smell sweetens cement.
Walking against the grain I feel
the old houses remember me,
the homely kid with glasses
who spotted a ghost in the woods
and got the town in an uproar.

No one alive can name that ghost
but the houses with their horsehair
plaster ceilings hold their ground
and the old cement sidewalks
retain the footfall of Buster White
stumbling drunk from the woods, his face

a pasty muddle. Most people
assumed I’d assumed him a ghost.
Fifty years later I’m certain
whatever I saw still lingers
where the river trips over sandstone
ledge on its way to the sea. The rain

brings out the old cement aroma
but also gives body to the ghost
stumbling beside the river
as if commemorating Buster
and all the other local drunks
I’d once hoped to emulate.