your sleeping shoulders are alert, an osprey’s.
last night, they angled beneath my hands like bone knives.

the smooth blade of your sternum cut my heart away.
I will lift it warm from between my breasts
and place it in a cabinet of cherry and walnut
until the darkening daylight dims and I may return.

dawn, and you float while I can only watch
who lack function when there is no flesh.
I can not grind my body into your dreams
or curl into a handle melded to you lip and hip,
and must leave you sleeping, remote as the hidden moon.

day comes again, again resistant to my wishes;
it will not pause in the shadows, nor rotate faster
to spin you into waking night and my waiting emptiness.

The Lover heard the wind chimes, loud.
Copper, bamboo, and glass they tolled in the blast.
This they told the Lover: your night will be cold.

The Lover still watches and worries and waits.
For the beloved, the wind hears a wish.
Warmth to you, safety, and peace my heart.

Be at peace like the dead until we lie together.

I’ve got your wing,
Zipper One.
Blue skies!

chant and answer
call and response
Do pilots talk like that
outside old winged-hero films
where khaki skirted women were an afterthought,
a temporary pause in the rising action?
do they embellish banal life and death
with that boy child’s exuberance?
or is the man-machine link
evidence of a rebirth into the flight of numbers
airless beyond speech and the debris of gestation
hard-kicking, pressing flattened backbone through padded leather–
heavy, thrusting mathematics
calculating parabolic arcs
beyond the ordinary blue,
and crass half-eaten moon.

the young buds were a green mist
against white distant sky
when he left the snow road, never to see
tattered gray jonquils lighten gold with the dawn.
they say he followed the rumbling bells
down, down and down beyond three magic doors,
and found fetid breaths of an icy tomb.
there beneath crystal roses, lovers like marble
trilled with moist laughter over torn still-live prey.
in crimson and carmine and coral and rust
they danced for a year in the heart of the hill.
for the red balls
the costume is blood.

the cherries were warm in the sun,
alluring as love or the beauty of fire
when he gambled on seeing the world as it was,
woke to the damage and cried for escape.
he followed his heart to the surface
through a door of jet with a latch of glass
through an ocean door with a stormkiss hinge
past the choir of swans, past the sparrow and sheep
to the desperate market gate.
for the barding,
the costume’s no frisson of fear.

the butterflies were a cloud of light
across the baked bloom of long tapered branches
when he found the highway he lost in the snowdrifts
switched for black tar, hot to his touch, cutting
mounds of goldenrod studded with ironweed.
he followed the road past the school and the church
and the plant where the farmers turned gold into oil
urgent as thirsting, ardent as hunger.
for the homecoming
the costume is joy over panic.

the town seemed no more than a frieze in the dusk,
a polite lunch, a cool good-bye kiss, un-amazing;
life on earth was a dull stuff, modulated to trickling
the cool pallid stars turned to paste diamantes
the moon’s silver flash was a pap and a hoax.

he begged to take back that one throw of the dice,
to close his eyes willing away the dank truth
but no one returns to the underground chambers,
though they still dream the wafts of a delicate trill.
morning brings nothing where memory was
for bitter regret
has no costume at all.

have you heard the night rants of the Iowa bard?
he rose, oh he rose, primavera again
with a glow and a song and the lilt of the stars
and he’s mad as the river in flood.

Today
my fool and I are lovers
they are coming says my fool
hide your eyes stay out of sight or be discovered
I will cover your eyes with kisses and black silk as a reminder

Tomorrow
my fool and I will have parted
give me your heart my fool has said
I will hide it safe in a hollow tree never to be discovered
I will cover your breast with kisses and red silk as a reminder

brown eyes could see my soul
wild dear of my green clover
you left with no word
did you find gold and silver?
would you know me now
wife and mother
I remember the eyes
of my first lover.

I can not spin or weave
for thinking of green and brown
blackbird bends the millpond reed
and whistles sweet alone
would you know me
by my song
if we met in the twilight
ma faune

Corcovado--Nara Leão

combine the buzz of dry cicadas
carried across the afternoon
like women gossiping down green arcades
with idle heat and spanish wine.
you, who can not sleep at night
dissolve. lines out of songs combine
forgotten memories, while the light
slides out of yellow-red toward lilac.
overhead the painted airplanes write
you love notes, shyly as boys in public.

the dialogs behind your closed eyes fade
you lift your empty glass to drink
and wonder just a little at the way
twilight has learned to move so softly

oh, look here
come to see the end, then?
come watch us drown with time

well take my hand and call me Beatrice
I’ll tell you who is who.

we’re only small deities these days
obsolete as horsehair sofas
most decades we’re as staid
as Mondays
somewhat mad of late
of course. it’s the bad air

that, over there
with the nervous tic
was the least arm of an ancient sea
adored
until her clans met Drought
and started to obsess with blood and mares’ milk
such a sorrow, poor thing

that circle yonder
pretending to be standing stones
is middle management
attending to the birthday boy
he’s too old, you know, for carbon dating
his mother was granite, or his father. I forget.
don’t mistake that glacial grimmace for a smile
he hasn’t been happy
since some hipocrite emperor declared him dead and buried
aeons ago
really, though, that’s only his breath
I’d leave, if I were you,
before he blows out the candles.