Cape Cod

Sleep little sister
and may it be blessed with crepuscular blues.
May it be the rest for which the wanderer yearns
after a lifetime
away from home.

Sleep undisturbed,
I have locked the house up tight
and counted all the gold.
Dream.

Be the nightsailor's simple prayer.
Be the seashell the ocean drowns twice.
Be the little beast
who drifts safe in the sunken rock whirl.
Be the superb spiral.

Dream deeper
in sleep's breakdown.
Forget my surprise July promise
and all the times I said
and all the time.

Forget me
I am only one of a million stars
to wish upon
before the sky goes dark
under summer rain.

Chinese New Year

for Sarah Manguso
 
 
Denizens of Suburbia began the letter we threw away, we knew the rest…
Nothing was coming as surprises those days,
not how the hallway clouded as bare legs darkened the empty stairs  
propelled by fresh disbelief.
What the young Duke thought when they told him his second wife was dead
was something else altogether.
Outside the party window duck wings smash 
a picture perfect sky;
gunshots are surely close behind. 
Saints be praised! Mother made it home alive; and in this weather! 
And when you said  logic is just a fine idea with knockout legs.
A brief struggle. a little wet joy, and then a lifetime of misery. 
Someone cut the Fragonard out of its frame,
enough peace treaties let's draw up a shortlist starting with this lad right here!
Is that girl, the strange one, still outside
picking daisies in the dark?
Why won't you let me  talk about raindrops when all I want to do is talk about raindrops?
Your eyes. My eyes. Time's knife. 
And what we never did in Brooklyn…
Tomorrow, right after breakfast we burn the script!

Versailles

Angeltorturer,
how many more wolves
must I send to your unanswered door?
How many more returned letters will go  un
opened, unread, and undiscovered. 
After all this fickle ticking time, after
so much lusty going toe-to-toe,
so much bad weather
weathered,
can you deny me so much as a second
glance from the fast carriage at dawn?
It is true
I have faltered,
lived a stumbler marooned on the hard rock,
seen shadow instead of sunlight,
lambs as lions,
but your silence has been a dawn statue
carved in love's garden 
in winter
(although this I secretly adore). 
I have seen the future
the way apples see autumn
the way young girls  bring tides. 
I am no magician
but I boast the memory of a buried king. 
Be kind to me
I am the only one who will remember you 
and all your distressed pleasures
a hundred years from now.  

Love Letter

My love I am not well.
But this you must already know.
These thousand nights
you have spent alone and waiting
while I wandered,
wishing only for a shoebox of noons
and white towels at the locked door. 
Your letters I could not keep.
I burned them. 
So many odd, new words
like red balloons
rising though birthday air.
I felt afraid of what they might do
if I let them.
Some bits I memorized,
especially when you talked about
The confetti of my falling apart days
and, the abandoned pinks of our last afternoon.
I liked those, a lot.
I even wrote back, how loving you was like 
driving on unplowed snow at midnight.
How the sky here reminds me of our honeymoon.
How you howled like a whipped dog till dawn. 
But letters get lost so easily these days. 
June here is magnificent. 
The coast is quiet and full of God. 
I will enclose a photograph
once I get my camera back again.
The ships are ready to leave.
Men crowd the bows with salt and ashes. 
The bars here are alive until well after dawn. 
Once you told me all you could do was hurt me.
I don't remember what I said back. 
But I do know it was something with arrows from a gilded quiver. 
This mountain will climb itself. 
The horses will disappear over the blue hill. 
I will come home again.
Quite soon.
Wait for me.