my baby, she got toes

my baby, she got toes
sunk so deep in that morning
grass that she says, daddy,
i can't walk.

and i say no, i can't
pick you up, you need
to walk honey, it's just
from the dew

my baby, she got hair
blond as the sun, and it
shine in july the way the heavens
weep down on the forgiven

and i say, i love you,
and she look at the
tree with the horse
swing and she laughs

my baby, she got eyes
that consume the anxious,
fired multitude of all those
raging lovers

and adorns them with the
taffeta of her innocent
kissing lips and kindly
cooing breaths

my baby, she got a
hold on life as firm
as oak and she won't
let go for nothing

and she grasps my hand
as we walk toward home
and she whines about how
the world is too cold

my baby, she cry in her
sleep and it sound like
the release of black birds
from a consuming wood

and her momma, she wake
and stroke her head and she
whisper, home home
home baby home

                                                                                                                    i read a story in a magazine
                                                                                                                    that said a momma saved
                                                                                                                    a beach ball that was blown
                                                                                                                    up by her teen son hours

                                                                                                                    before he was killed in
                                                                                                                    a car accident and she told
                                                                                                                    the reporter, "it's all i got.
                                                                                                                    his air. it has his life in there"

my baby, she sing to me
in the back seat to the
radio and i don't
know no other nectar

that sounds sweeter
and i don't know no
better to just shut up
and listen to her

my baby, she got toes
growing clover up in
between them that make her
cry for my arms

so i pick her up
and her arm wraps
'round my neck and
together we sail home

i see the future in the
sky full of dying stars
and i feel the cleansing
of the light in that old dark

i don't care about nothing
in certain moments when
my baby wipes her grassy
feet on my shirt and giggles

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shed

there is a spirit of her
in the things she wears
when she disrobes and
disarms after a long day

and she leaves a pile of
clothes in the bedroom
and with them she leaves a pile
of echoes in the
small heap of pants and
blouse, socks and bra

and she loosens her
life and unlatches her
clasp on a certain reality
outside these walls; her
release of a cold day
is the emission of
her essence particles

in the atmosphere of this
place i find her everywhere:

the favored pillow that crowds the
headboard;

the aborted sandal beneath the couch;

the worn hair tie hung on the knob
of the pantry door;

the fragile handrail that creaks with
the weight of the years;

the rim of the cup left to wait on the counter;

the heavy bracelet, adorned and
dimmed in the darkness of a shadow;

the blanket she pills in the night while she sleeps

i revel in her presence
in every moment shared
together as lovers

but feel her absence the
way i sense the waves of the sea,
how they rock the soul
when i can
hear them on the air
miles distant from me

all of these things
and every one of them
not witnessed thus far
emit a spectral ode
heard in the bones
of those future comers

who traverse the
streams of the dreamers
and are in tune
with the vibrations
made by the heartstrings
of former lovers

i believe in ghosts in
that simple way: they
haunt from the discarded
molecules of their flesh
when once they walked
and felled clothes
and touched doors
and breathed into linens

these small bits of souls
shed as easily as my
lover shed her clothes
enter their dormancy
and wait for a future
listener who will
catch them in an
unsuspecting moment

they haunt not from
a pouty rage, but as
a way to reconnect with
that of the living;

they want nothing more
than to be fleshed
again and making
love or leaving rooms
or crying into palms
or applying make up

my lover's left garments
i scoop up and pour
into a washing machine that
will spin out the dirt of
a day, but her mark
is already made

in a future,
they will smell her and
feel the heat of her and
taste the salt of her and
picture the curve of her hips
and hear her breathing at night

the way i love
to know her
she will haunt
them

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the lily, for good

i recognized the face
of the girl who passed
away recently and to
whom friends were
writing messages of love
and loss across the sterile
wires

we went to high school
together, i'm sure of it,
yet we never spoke and
today the idea of that
leaves me in an echo
chamber with my own
clanging sorrows

i sit and ponder
the face of a woman,
once fully-fleshed and
smiling, who smiles now
no more

whose flesh is forever
seized and withering
but whose soul has been
released to the eternal ether
of the breath of the Goddess
to be re-breathed some day

what changed for her?
- i wondered this -
what transpired that she
be taken now and not later?
what thin variance came
to alter her path?

outside our living room
window stands a congregation
of gilded lilies, weighted
down by a spritz of raindrops
that fell the night before

i imagine the droplets
as souls sent on a call from a
god made caustic for having to
release his children to their
deaths in the name of sacrifice

and they all fell
freely in that darkness,
millions of them across
my small universe

and came to rest
on blades, petals and paths;
steal, rock, and the wool
of the animals in our
pasture

no prescription given,
no forthright agenda
but to descend in earnest
to us here and make whatever
change was open to their
impact

each of them
willing participants
in a ritual of
enlightened
love-offering

their cause known
to no one, no thing,
no beast, not even
to each other

i believe that
my lover, my most
sacred familiar,
is opening

the warmth of
a newly discovered sun
perhaps or the nutrients of
a freshly tilled
earth are pushing
her to flower
anew

without my hand
so much this time
and i stay awake
in reverie of her
new growth
but fearful of my
own waning
influence

i observed the
petals of a particular
lily in our garden
whose flesh was now
dotted with these
felled jewels

and my eye caught
one single droplet
clinging to the lip
of the lily's petal
and i stayed it with
the shutter of my
camera

i've since returned
to my writing and
wonder now what
would become of that
single crystal bead
whose passage began
in the dark with a single
mission and ended in that
precarious hang

will it have fallen
to the grass below
and nurtured something
there, leaving the
lily to her other
agents? and will that
reduce her chances
of flower? will it ruin her?

i think too of the girl
now gone, and wonder
what element might have
collided and clung to her
then fallen away and taken
with it a different fate

and whether had i spoken
to her in a long-ago
past might have favored
her and her own glassy
droplet of life in some way

or if i take a
picture of my lover
i can arrest her
in her frame and
preserve what i think
she is ought to be

and then i'm
reminded:

i must not indulge
fantastic thoughts
about the power of
my own influence
over the cosmic
and the chaotic

the wind blows
and the rain comes
after all, no matter
how i wave my hands

and that i am
not outside of this
but deep within

and the girl is changed
and the lily is
and my lover too

and me

yes. yes of course

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love is curtains toward a view

i'm waiting for my turn
on the stage with
the seashell footlights
shining silhouettes
against a cream-colored
scrim

i'm waiting my spotlight -
how can it be so
not simple?

i sit in a bedroom
with white curtains,
a fan oscillating on
a desk, cooling my fever
while behind me is the
bed in which we
made love last night

i can't make my art today
for the humidity and
the brawling children who
are hateful with the heat

you can go,
she says - go
upstairs, you can
go - write

if i were a play's
hero-character today
i would be the one
who left his dreams
for a lover who
hated the lips of life
and sucked from him
passion

until he found the
love in the light of
a caress in the dim
hallway of a theater
playhouse, his
breath stopped
for the sake of
renewal then

my lover told me
recently she might
take up smoking
as a way to lose weight
and my first impression
was how sexy it would
be to watch her purse her
lips around the end
of a cigarette and take
seductive draws

the way women used to
look to me in the movies
of the 40s when
i feigned sickness in
order to skip school
to watch classic movies
on my grandmother's
cable television

behind the white curtains,
out an old screened
window, across a variable
way, is a barn standing fast:
an empty assertion of age
and history

in the leading man
of a show i would make
them all laugh and cry
and they'd send me telegrams
by the fistfuls
if we're following this
sort of nostalgic current

the barn was painted
last year for the old
man who lives there,
who looks out his
window frequently toward
our house, i wonder if he
feels a pull in the
heart when he watches us
making love, missing
his own life-love lost years
ago

the idea makes
me sad and watching
the curtains float
makes me want to
curl beneath the
sheets behind me
and smell her

sometimes love
is curtains toward a
view we're afraid
to see, waving -
sadly parting,
while a fan manufactures
a breeze that we can't feel

that's not true,
i'm being moody
and infatuated with
pity as i sit here

the curtains are
irrelevant

we'll make love
again tonight
and tomorrow
and in a dream,
afterward, i'll
give my monologue
in the dark to
great applause while
she smokes

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