spring,
where you danced like a walk spinning towards me
with a smile surrounded by the angelic lights of a may
day—those hips a-sway like a hesitation heaven—
and i fade out like light through a straw
watching you watching me
one last time with all that love in your eyes,
youth and the heart filling us up like idyllic wings
flapping a new breeze where a clean world might emerge,
more beautiful than the last, more lovely than lavender
or mist
or spring
or your naked body clothed only by the sun
22
the spray of starlight on your skin, a wash of
moonlight that lays on your thigh, exposed with
the ease of an elegant reminder of grace and youth
warms me full like a fire that forgets fuel and burns
brighter still in the secrets of the shadows that hide
your hands so that i can’t touch them to wake you
for a slow, silent sex
i’ll watch you breathe, the rising of your chest,
your breasts, the quiet white of a whisper, lulls
my sleepy eyes into a dream where dancing is as
effortless as walking while the children sleep, cozy
and coded in our life, and we can share the day’s
discoveries with the same wonder and desire of first
touch tangles, because who knows when, who knows
kiss, who knows this much more about you
23
you mind the mystery of me, make a memory
of a younger face within me when my hands
were stronger and there was that sound of
massaging out whispers, always new rainy
puddles of push when i laid my hands on you,
a soft recognition of inner noise where fragility
hangs faint futures off piling up pasts,
of beautiful in the present, playful places where
we might open and close our clothes like a heart
were being bled just for the feeling, just a life tangled
up together climbing a clumsy wondercluster of
yesterdays and tomorrows
24
there is a musical vibration beneath the walls of
this dream, little dancers that present the rhythm of
my sleep with excited breaths, many birdsounds turn
to emulate the song of the snows of youth, and i am
quietly remembering a younger man, painfully in love
with a reckless heart and mind full of hurricanes and
power surges crashing into the water left by the rain
of her hands, those fingers stretching across my face,
waking up in the science of a kiss, a man from a boy,
an idea to life, a breath into a poem
25
you can not press a cloud for rain when
the veil of storms has collapsed on the lap
where your mother made you from stars, and
those maternal smells, those whispering mother
moments you find in the strange corners of the mind
are a standard where loveliness makes new places to
hold close to the heart like a secret where memories
are held in a box where the soul is unopened and
all your dreams and melodies are yet to be discovered,
where all the talents of dancing and perfumed kisses
sit and wait for you to comfort them into life, for life to
bloom from the storage of a silent soul
26
my hands make secrets of tenderness
when we touch, these fingers build
musical mythologies on your pinkest
skin, spreading out petals like pressing
palms on the sheets of this silk sex where
paint is poured on later dreams and light
shows colors to miracles and magic shines
one more sensational star a way out of heaven
to plant a puddle on this angel’s kiss, my angel,
damp and delirious like a breathing were coming
undone in the heart, a lyrical pain that shoots songs
like the sun waking up a memory of paradise you thought
you knew but was always hiding somewhere in her hair
27
i’ve watched your body dance waist deep
in wonderful while silently i sat stretching
songs out in the rhythm of your walk, where
the waves wake up a little music in my mind-sky
like a wish fell out your lips as elegantly precise
and mysterious as a rain drop or some terrific
shivering tear that finds the wet of the water that
reflects my love like a painting of the stars by a
dream scientist trying to unwrap the secrets of
those shimmer sounds as they whisper their mystery
when we touch as the lights go out and the world
is quietly full of breathless swimming and the dance
becomes a current that takes us under the surface of
songs
28
i’ve long watched your curve of a body lay
tenderly out over the world like a water resting
on the sky and something so achingly familiar
hides on the flesh of your thigh, like the prettiest
puddles of eden were to open up like a new
blue, making clouds hover so white like warm
cotton resembling snow were to slide me into
your body like a dream undone by this true
dancing that makes wishes come together and
the empties fall apart where some wonderful bird
meets a flower and the nectar sings for serendipity’s
rainbow
29
my heart with your fingers, pressing like an
awareness bird were resting in your palm
like a flower were blooming inside your kiss
where fingertips dance whispers on the meaning
of lips that speak in whistles wet with reaching,
stretching into songs of snow
and there is warmth where the blood meets
the skin and your skin meets my skin and
there happens a wash of remembering where
the years hold handfuls of delightful delusions
called dreams waiting to be let open for a fly
away
30
what is it about your knees that wake up the
tendrils and wisps that grow from vibrations
of old spring whispers of the rain that pour
inside this chest breathing bird whistles and
waiting for the sun to open up those legs for
a stroll into stuttering silences of something so
unceremonious as my head resting on your chest,
the smell of the rain like a secret sleeping on your
breast,
and the sounds left behind by our sacred
sputtering makes us ever more conscious of clouds,
our heads singsonging in the bellies of butterflies
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Personal Acknowledgements
There are a few people without whom this book, and most, if not all, of the poems within it would not exist.
I would like to give special thanks to the following for their immeasurable influence and inspiration: A. Scott Britton, Nelson Heise, Megan Lightell, John Miller, Joe Riddlebarger, Scott Rinehart, Alta Sims, and Peter Trier.
Their fingerprints are found somewhere on all of the poems in this collection.
I would like to thank my children, Caroline and Alex, for op
ening my eyes to a new way of seeing almost everything, like seeing the world again for the first time.
Lastly, I would like to thank my wife, Sarah, who has given me permission to be a poet unapologetically. It can be a difficult life to live with a poet, but she makes it seem effortless. Sarah is, and will always be, my most elusive muse. I look forward to a lifetime of trying to capture all that she will inspire within me.
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