how to give

i.

sharing today of summer fruit

with bright skin & red center you

are a bearing branch.

stemming new                   .

far from the source.

breath, as it sways

our youngest parts,

held fast to center,                           

splinters from another season.

caught inside memory’s

rings. my old paper head

trying to embrace with you           

& words known. phrases all ready 

before lips can crash

too easy into sound. find,

again & again,

not what we wanted to say

dripping like juice hits paper

from seasons: chin, nose & eye, absorbed.

deforming the surface.       

ii.

cadence gestures in form.

you on fragments.

of me in verse. the one

over me. when i shake

limbs to so many rhythms.

greeting every

one, as to one.

is a frantic dance.

but i attempt\attune new movements, posit a brief  backslash over myself inflected.

to conduct harmony. between them: my fingers. 

(are song), my days (ending rhythmical phrase),

my forms & my attempts,

my teachers (the people i learn of & same ones i love),

pivoted to form an I : dilating pupil’s negative capacity

as common denominator. as sound vessel. ( i pivot !

& i am a prospective equation.

derived from the colder season:

so consider intent              

mine alone. now we are floating

& i have canceled standards.                             

value is yours alone to strike

as this gold is from a fool’s vein.

iii.

without sleep i become soft

& of endless supply. feel overwhelming.

patience. & want to fix the exposed

shirt tags of strangers,

hold their blue hands, refold

their collars.

please accept my characters, my crumpled face

tilted to the side,

my weary eyes unblinking.

these images. unresolved.

by some indefinite work.

form will be sound.

see: (as an eye for a corti with fewer leaks.

swaying. precise transduction) worthy.

[or it may all disappear into the free association cortex,

growing text-static as it courts grey matters]

of the associated sticks & stones.

& yet. again i drone fuzzy.

with humor that is not vitreous

but glassy-eyed. be patient.

with me. i am an uncertain surgeon.

iv.

it has been difficult for me to be precise.  

as there is a pulse here & there.

are kind words typed & erased.               

notes written but undelivered.             

strong branches split and jointed

to support the new limbs Dali painted us,

distended & growing wild as a question,

but deciduous as a pedagogy.

so i leave you as a synesthetic child.

rooting through colorful clay.

for a gift of malleable value. each medium discrete

while blending into the next. wanting for you.

to resonate in a way that is not possible. & i am a child.

a \ vector.

come self aware.

attempting to transform.

my formal movements. to give how. are we glassed.

am i.  fruitless.                                                                

& so the last eyes of the few are who.                

harmonic of resin rings.

give how to.            

Prospect

 

      The pattern is made of light blue on thin cotton white and it only reaches halfway down to your knee; higher when you sit down next to me.  You were probably wearing something different but this is how you appear in my memory.  The grass gaped and yawned down to the pond where a dog was off his leash and chasing coots and mallards.  Black women in shouldered pairs were speaking in unrecognized languages as they pushed strollers with sleeping white children down the dirt path, a slightly gritty sound emitting from the wheels, punctuated by the syncopated rhythms of their separate strides and I wanted to whisper to you that I didn’t care about anything today but instead I picked up your crooked hand.  I wrapped my fingers into yours and looked up at your face.  Instead of making eye contact you laid back and closed your eyes, your hand limp in my desperate squeeze.  So I looked down at your legs as they traveled away from me towards the cheap flip-flops wound around your toes.  I could see a bruise forming on your leg where my knee had crashed the night before as I was attempting to scale your body.  It was sad knowing that we could sit here under the speck of a distant plane that foreshadowed the end of this dream, and know we couldn’t talk about it if we couldn’t drink a few bottles of wine.  And you knew that I was not made to be met on the path, and we both knew that you didn’t want the wine, you were only here to crush the grapes with your far away feet, but we knew that if we didn’t say anything we could wait just a little longer.

At the Bloom

I thought the fall would never go away.

That we could remain trapped

behind a progression of color changes

in imitation of the signals for stop and slow.

Those are warm colors and we raked them

into big piles to leap from the highest branch.

In my mind I can still see you

sitting on couch beside me

listening to the neighbor’s argue

with the recalcitrant television 

through the crumbling wall,

laughter, impervious

to the constitutive imperfections.

Sometimes this memory keeps me warm.

Then the winter where I couldn’t

quit looking through books

to find us. One piece of paper

and two pens so we could go until

definition was achieved, obscurity

obscured and life decanted into pages.

Into a beautiful prosaic addiction.

Your devotion was wrecked and in

hand two weeks later,

so we opened the windows

and cast the blame on cultural construction.

We grew roots as deep as the days, lengthening.

At the bloom, drunk and

looking for something was

your defense for hands and knees.

I think we amended our seeming.

New things were found and

found wanting but like pack rats

we kept everything, believing

anything might come in handy.

The final summer,

I remember how one night

lying in bed I realized

that the pieces rent from myself

formed no trail back to the start so

I kissed your hands, promised

not to leave and opened the door

to find some unfamiliar seasons.

Maybe there was a time when we had it

cornered. It must have been too small to see.

A PART OF THE MAIN

                                               ­­

To say that with winter begins

the frustrations of mortality is inaccurate,

but I do not feel such an ungrateful

passing below the empty trees.

There is a solidarity

amid the delicate chain reactions

of the abandoned sibling of Persephone.

The burden of our elaborate

wiring is a promise understood.

That the bell will ring for us

I now understand as a plea,

a scheme for the living who, struck

by the fading shrills, with claims

in the schemes of diminishment,

offer their gifts in faith of riches

when the bell lies on their deaf ears.

I am unsure even that the tree

still grows after our falls.

Is there trend to the senescence,

the leavings may nourish or

yet maybe they will suffocate,

or are we a forest?