Love like Goths
When you are in love, the laundry goes unwashed
and mail collects like mold in a mailbox by the road.
Wallpaper unglues and slowly peels away like meaning from a word.
You are absorbed into the great unknown and the living
blacken their mirrors darkening a way to the land of Dis.
Your possessions, your favorite saltshaker, your albums,
your lambskin coat with the bone ivory toggles,
all stand like orphans in a corner of an emptied house
then find new homes where they occasionally recall the touch
of your fingers. Thunder is a faint memory.
When you are in love you ignore cutoff notices
and appeals to donate to PETA.
When you are in love, your blood brightens the veins
of an elderly man in Pasadena, who himself will
someday become a donor, and in this way your blood
will someday course through a child in Oaxaca.
When you are in love, dark wave compositions
charge the ears of those sitting solemnly at your funeral.
When you are in love, your works are a luxury to your family
who will study how you breathed between sips of oolong tea.
When you are in love, you gleam brighter than ever before.
Marching Guard
Let’s say we’ve moved beyond ambition,
that masculine monsoon of goals and deadlines,
and the impossible reckonings of power
which politicians wear on their faces
like gnarled branches. Let’s say the saturnine
children were not abandoned and let’s say
I loved you as much as I loved my oak-colored nose
and the impossible moose hidden on the sides
of county roads in Maine, would you hold
my oddities to your chest like the found gold of 1849?
Would you pan the clear streams of my blunders
and carry back to your mining camp my corroding
extractions gleaming like nuggets -- all bling and no history.
Dust and sand have blown over these feet for years.
Nameen? The songs beneath my opening nights are blue.
Nameen? I’ve journeyed more seas than ancient pirates
and only have low-interest bank statements to show for it.
Oh dear, hand me my workman’s clothes.
I’ve rifles to spin like a member of a marching guard.
This Giant World
The gilt-edged windows at Versailles,
blue light reflecting off the tenor
saxophonist’s horn at Small’s in the Village,
its solo riding across the ceiling and twisting
through a doorway into a back kitchen, which upon
hearing, pauses the sous chef who gazes forever
into a plate of apples and curly endive,
the broken jaw of a boxer wired
like a contraption, a rust-colored striped
nautilus floating past a child’s diving mask
for the first time, their excited look
sharing with their fellow fifth-graders
in front of class in a report titled
What I Did This Summer, the quiet
of the room like prairie grass in summer,
the bullet that missed its target,
the harsh words held in the mouth,
my mother’s bright turquoise purse
full of ancient mysteries
and plastic-wrapped square candies
that arrived like one big yes
to the worlds’ no, the great mirror ball
at Cloud Gate in Chicago, today’s
cold spring day heavy with the scent
of magnolias, the brown walls of the old
convent delicate with the scent of longings
which I am ready to receive.
Almost
We barely tasted salt, those miniature icebergs
like crystals on tiny hairs of a neck.
We almost stood at the threshold of something great.
It was the ivory senates that nearly made us worried
as we virtually whistled down the lanes.
We practically objected to proposed laws.
The girls hardly carried baskets of petrified insects,
preserved ants trapped in resin.
We saw their suffering and almost thought of our sons.
We came close to thinking shorn lambs.
We came close to kissing the end of our days.
But it was too early. We were almost sixteen.
It was almost too good to be emotional.
We were close to forming gardens.
We went to sip from our blue cups but the bombs
caught us merely blowing at the lips.
We were almost quenched.
