metonymy4u

I loved you like a thunderstorm,
or a lonely winter lion in a long helpless rage.
I loved your heart, your smile,
your laughing parted lips.
I loved you when you were sad.
I loved you when you were away.
I loved you always and even
when you didn’t love me back.
Love came and went like a hand shake in the dark—
its part unfound in any song or secret diary,
and this is the love I fear is killing me
like sand in poison. It is speed,
a sure hand on the dart.

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word strings wrapped in feeling.
i imagined we might be together some day.

but to connect the meek and the weary
ballads and lanterns weren’t enough.
i missed your heart and songs
unsung just don’t belong between the yellowed pages
of love and inquiry.

what sad rush of freedom, tender dust of multiple centuries
again and again attempting to block a past of immanent discovery
now speaks

to my heart in a poem?

i want the conclusion of this to be your final betrayal.
i want you to weep for this fruitless endeavor.

i mean realism
in a bottle of water.
i mean silence
in each step of grace.

i mean despair.

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O let me be some fresh untutored youth
in your fair springs and in your eyes—
I would that my voice would never want for growth
upon your midnight there. Then let me see
my name’s work never let down,
let me be confirmed in every breath
in every town. Soon I’ll find a way
to silence shared by all your blighted stars
in their starry lighted sky. Truly though,
I should wonder what’s in a name and why
we seek one’s tender evasive care—nature’s loves
that can never be denied their ghostly due;
though they be lies, I would you loved me true.

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imagine
a time before all this—
imagine
joy in a drop of life:
each child a face
of someone’s face
of love

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Poetry is

an attempt
only to hold onto earth
that is transitory, once in the offering.
what we can give to
the dead earth, being living is a hint,
a gesture of air and a
slow unfolding of the rose

with our science and persuasion. you
know you feel. but does anybody else? So
cleverly then one winds
the passage of death through the
green grass that
you want to have a purpose. I

see reflection in reflection
echoes in a muddy pool
only
and not the pause of summer
that we implicitly were
promised by a mind

we thought of integrity.

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Pre-arrangement was

back then
a flowering intercept
of seeding
streets and
children poured
from God’s fingers,
peopling a planet
hardly cool
and just barely
formed
round by its
own
gravity, this
theory
filled minds
every day like
rain on my childhood dreams
hissing sheets
grey prisming
what I could see
and, such
sounds touching
memory,
drop by baby drop
overflowed the
basin
of
infancy.

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            The Year with Roses

The empty river has only its stones & things
to tell me of morning and the day to come.
Where is your breath that I once saw
scooting o’er mountains, chilling my bones
too soft and too silent really to hear.

Where can it have got to

Now
when I needed you most?

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Sometimes

in meditation I find I
can’t remember the one
who opened my gates of compassion:

her voice, her smile, her quiet
griefs that I found strewn
all over the floor as I walked
again, slowly
to her hospital
bed.

The
last time we spoke
she wanted to meet me outside
“Right now,” she said, “let’s go.”

Meet me downstairs.

Held
still,
alone—

in such awareness of the hour of the day, I

slowly cry.

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If I could describe the face of god

and answer a universe poorly equipped to deal
with intention,
what whispered words in your morning ear would

suffice?

And would you believe it?

Instead here I am:
learning to walk in my own footsteps
just within sight

of the ocean.

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if you wanted to be merciful you would kill me quickly
and use the suicide of death to accomplish your task.
why? because every life i have ever
surrounded myself with perpetuates
a cruelty of flowers. who brought me to the point
where stones that were meant to fall
from the mountain face plummet to dust?

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