gull

in this field of ragweed
where the name ragweed
unfolds in our breath like a childhood

we are lost together
you become the hour when i am born

.

oblique

an infinite distance

Rise

It comes unsought -- only unsought.

It comes uninvited -- only uninvited --
and by preference at the core of sorrow,
when sorrow without relief

slumps into the mind like thick,
obvious mud: the sick child,
the fallen marriage, the failing

god who hides the fragments of his face
in debris, weeks when you learn
sorrow is the only possibility.

It comes like this. One evening
you trudge along, broken,
a street chosen because choice

doesn’t matter, watching your numb
shoes, and for no reason at all
the late-spring light lifts itself

up from the late-spring lawns,
and the two sullen teens,
glaring as you pass, shyly

take each others’ hands,
and the fading sun
has just enough day left

to burn the stained glass
of a stone church
free of its gray blur,

so that gold and blue flash
and yearn, and the sky above
trembles now, ready -- ready

to fly open at just the right whisper.


.

tearing torn

she tore her other lives from the sunlight

lives she won’t taste now
leaves from a book or pages of breath

and let them flutter from her fingertips
or cupped their darkness between her palms

as if trying to warm a broken moth
struggling for a moment her eyes lowered

she wondered at her terror
terrified by her joy


,

i always wanted to be somewhere else

.

travel

Toward

Maybe the high clouds
will be there before me?

As if arrival
were already true in the departure,

I close this door
and think your pulse beats in my wrists.

What does distance matter now?


.