A Crest of Memories When the wind becomes my heart and I undo your eyes on night's other edge, a bitter taste floods my tongue like a nub of tamarind. The absence drinks you dry and you recall the reasons for forgetting and why, why you've learned to sleep in that shadow memory. What is the sound of love in this dark hour of death? the look in your eyes as you drift aside, then far away in some other knowledge where songssuffused with lilacs and blazing stars help you die of such things? Or, those absent figures orbiting waters, most tranquil the endless returning in the shadow of days where no outside nor inside pervades-- comforting like wind through the pines, then that glowing sadness in the wrinkle of water as we slip from the dream. Coming up to eye-level, we open the windows and doors--and, finally, we let the dusk enter. Could I Be Saying This in All My Own Voices? Cold hand against blue skies Gray reason ticking Premonitions hidden behind language speaking in tongues Night, wise night that brush of death my brush with death in the mask of childhood Keeper of shadows-- shapemaker out of nothingness reshaping First Astronaut on Jupiter The glisten, listen, globular collusion, that crackle. In awe at the waves of peroxide frothing, snorting across the shore. A ring of stones immersed in a spiral of silence on fields of ice. To be the very first stone.

and the sunlight faintly steals like a fox behind another ring of stones. Your heart is torn as a fleeting moment of fire burns the atmosphere from this Milky Way of young souls. But where, you ask, is the driftwood picking up on the shore? and the surge of the sluggish river winds down, slowing vapors, shadows . Listen, you can hear the years sifting through the bedrock, falling into the bottom of ourselves while the earth thrusts quietly ahead. and the murmur of her forest at night and the hollow walls of air, the calls of the drunken dove, the ticking of ants moving their cities halfway across the world. And, still as dragon clouds, these dawn waters, this land of untouched snows. Meteor Showers and as the dream reaches out toward us darkness falls again. A wheel spins in the unknown engine.

At the end of the hall a figure, a man arrestedin a murmur of voices. That man is a carved stone facing cold ocean. Dreaming the Beautiful and once again thoughtful winter rumbles toward us as we walk home under the signs that praise the stark skyline, the garbage cans littering driveways, the swarms of passing cars-- weightless we descend the incline into the future, the souls beneath the grass giving little thought to our ongoing intrusions. How ripe the air smells, condensed in silent promises. Is there something else we can trust, something other than the air? To stand still in the twilight, the moisture sticking to our palms, to feel the city becoming its heavy breathing and those figures slipping deep into the dark allure of a Friday night.