Upstream Proclamations

Cream
slides
into
coffee
in
a
milky
way,
and
perhaps
maybe
swell
if
you'll
sit
and
watch
with
me (
I've
lain
a
sandy
towel
here.)
A
cold
breeze
from
Puerto Juárez
comes
under
your
hair
and
up
it
rises
electric.
Oh,
esposa
palms
pressed
with
shells
gathered
palms
pressed,
esposa
to
my
shoulders
when
we
press
into
mouths
warm
like
coffee
cream
slipping
past
in
darkness
do
you
think
we
could
sit
and
watch
and
pray
and
will
you
wear
rings
here
where
a
cold
breeze
from
Puerto Juárez
comes
under
your
hair
and
up
it
rises.

Framed Images

Follow an image with a staggered gaze--a bird in flight, refracted from panes of a glasswork clock hung above the piano with the framed picture of the dead sister, if you like; a silhouette against a white cloudless expanse of air, refracted from the panes of a glasswork clock hung above the dead sister, if you can concede your preference for exactness. You should take time for this decision, though. Should consider heavily the differences (take time within the reach of the clock's metal arms): Flight, on the one hand, as linear. Bird, as sharpness preceding fragility, as an arrow, or an idealist. Silhouette, on the other, as grieving, irrevocable understanding, of the absence of the flight, the bird, the sister.

Pack Animals

Finding you hiding in the brush, so near. Yet it is dark, is it not my friend? I felt you brush past and you were gone. Our enemies are many. Certainly we agree on this point. Where are you tonight, are you well? Unseen? We're small, are we not, my brother? Our enemies are many. I've left the door open, so that maybe; she and I sleep in the hot flies in our eardrums rattling our foundations. My sleep is like a fit of shaking, I hear a ghost howling among the crickets for a way back. Somewhere in the back of our small heads we hear their voices, our enemies: You can't go back. Wish you could hear my voice calling your name, pitching my tone to reveal, "The fuck you can't." Finding you hiding in the brush, so near. We wait for your drawing near, from our enemies who are many.

Summer Without Forwarding Address

Sweeping motions made with fingernails on dark street glass windows glowing warm cast candle fire on one cheek, the other wind-striken and free to wander as it will. Albeit a little harder, a little tougher, a little less sensitive to the touch of a strange gloved hand when a Boston Christmas shopper might reach with indefinite and thoughtless emotion, or actually imagines this touch behind his eyelids for a moment as he passes. But these sidewalks do not cross, they are parallel lines into a snow storm the likes of which loneliness had not known some many years. And she wonders and he wonders if anyone wondered when the goddamn summer planned its slow burning crawl across the sweaty streets. Yet the stars carve sharp little penknife points into a letter not bothered to be read because it would be much too boring to remove it from its envelope with the pretty looping letters and postage. And who cares who it's from, who can tell with fingernails on dark street glass windows glowing warm cast candle fire on one cheek, the other indifferent to the stars and the things they may carve.