Tower Travels

1
If the gathering geese
tell me anything, it is flight.
Perhaps I can hold the world
in the palm of my iPhone,
but pixels are not reality.
Take that, Zuckerberg.

2
Her smile was like the sun
on summer grass, withering
where it shone most bright,
turning what had been green
and fragrant brittle and sickly
yellow. I had to get away.

3
There is nothing
like the glitter of ice
in the eye of a woman
who has decided to disapprove.
It is a blizzard.

4
But no one, man or woman, can hold back spring,
however long we scare off Father Christmas.
No glare will keep the flowers from opening,
no arched brow will stop up the rivers,
and, my dear, your frustration
will only melt the snow, swell
the streams, and let me float my raft away.

5
But rafts float finitely,
and all flights must land.
My new, improved, waxless wings
take me nearly to the sun
but the sun only blinds me,
the light of life too bright,
the projection of growth
too much for my skin to handle.

6
Earthbound again,
I find myself drawn
back to the cave,
the cool streams
and chilling breeze
making me wonder
if I ever left.

7
Back to Ground Zero, then.
To the cold of the womb
rejected, to the narrow rock straits
staring me down as I huddle
beneath outcrops, the towers
throwing twin shadows across
my eyes, my lies, my soul.

Goodnight

We smoked three cigarettes,
then you drove away
leaving me a burning filter



and an unasked question:
that night, lost in the woods
by your father's house,
the woods in our hearts,


when it seemed the dark
surrounded, invaded, devoured
our very beings,


was it the man who appeared
wearing a long white trench
and a white panama hat
who saved us--or was it you?

Our Last Conversation

When the sun overfilled the horizon’s seawalls
we lay there still, the silence of night on our lips
the morning’s dew wrapping our bodies
the harp-plucking fingers of the stars
thrumming final vibration across the heavens.

What did we say, that night? Rapturous things,
lines and stories and sonnets
that now only night remembers.

I drew a picture for you, one filled with lines
simple and complex, lines like rainbows
arching over hard canvas, lines like pearls
strung across the night sky
whose brightness made the stars jealous
and whose self-contained glow
even our friend, the Queen of Faerie
and of the Undying Lands, embittered
beyond all recognition of loveliness,
one night when she lay looking at stars
and wishing that one single man in her realm
could bear the beauty of a star, or that one
single star in her realm could outshine all the others,
when she looked up into the night sky and saw
a string of pearls as beautiful and well-made
as a human spine.

I remember the picture; I remember the hope.
I do not remember when you, rising and shaking off
your blanket of frost-colored dew, decided
that no magic and no harpsong could match
the adoration of flashbulbs, the glitter of a thousand
grins all focused on you. I laugh
sometimes to think about it, but my laugh
is as bitter as the Faerie Queen’s grin.

Stars

I remember looking up at the stars and whispering,
Dear God, please let me never be like them.
A great, flaming ball of gas? God asked. No,
I said, a pinhole in the ceiling of a decrepit universe.
I take offense at that, God said.
Sorry, I said.
You can guess what He said back.

To my children, if I have them

a rainbow is a treasure
a smile is rare
a friend is rarer
but don’t change your face
or change your form
just because some rare friend
with a rainbow for a smile
thinks you should; light
the night with a heart surrendered
not to some cave wall
shadow, reflection
of another person’s picture of you,
but to light, to truth
whatever the cost, and to love,
whatever the loss.

Anthology

Let’s get out of here, you and I
(while the evening is spread out against the sky—
and, you know, patient etherized upon a table,
muttering retreats, one-night cheap hotels, oyster shells),
and while we run, shall I compare you to a summer’s day?
You are more lovely and more innocent
than a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water
and the blood of innocence; sing your song
of sixpence, your queenliness, and bake your pie
to be sold by the little goblin men with their whiskers
and their rat tails, so that the hollow men, the stuffed men
may shamble down and, raging against the light’s dying,
may take their pies with them as they climb Mt. Fuji,
losing pieces of themselves, but slowly, slowly.
Do I contradict myself? No, I don’t, it’s just that
my vast multitudes are smarter than your vast multitudes,
so you can never hope to comprehend my world
of etherized, shambling, snail-like rat-tailed hollow men
whose world will end
in both fire and ice, slowly,
not with a bang but with a whimper.

[With many, many apologies to T.S. Eliot, Bill Shakespeare, Christina Rosetti, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and Issa. (William Carlos Williams is in there too but in my opinion he deserves anything he gets.)]

Grace and Old Atlantis

Let’s get out of here, you and me. But not
to any of those expected places,
the ones where they’ll look for us:
Ireland, Tokyo, New Guinea, Middle-Earth, Alderaan.
Let’s go into that old room in your old house,
the one with all the spider-webs
and the ghost of the dead girl
crying over her broken roller skates
and throwing blood at us,
the one where we once discovered a lake
with dead men floating to the top
to speak to us of dread things: the ships
of old Atlantis, the ones that carried world-destroying
crystals, the crews the king cast out because he could find no grace
in them, whose captains plotted and returned, and at the docks
where the sailors sang they unleashed a throne of blood
and swept Atlantis away.

The king could have saved them, remember?
But he was a coward. Let’s go save them,
go push the king to his fate so his people live.

Or if not that, let’s go down to the dead-end street
with the woods, where the trees slant crazily
and the stream winding through
seems like one of your mother’s unending sentences,
the ones like the prayers at church
that start off so innocent, bless us and our endeavors,
and grow to include the county, the state, the country,
the president, the world. Your mother,
bless her soul, has no idea of the world
we inhabit. Probably better that way.

Let’s go sit under the trees, feel our souls
slant in an empathic crazy tumult,
let our conversation slant sideways,
and revel in the grace we’ve found in each other.