(Primary) Colors

I pluck wild flowers like fresh water falls
dropping to a briny current along his spine.

He strings deep streams like white shells
on hay-colored yarn rested on my collarbone.

There is a comfortable silence that comes late night--
or is found in one another's presence.

[after Phish, Philadelphia 2009]

I was shawled in goldenrod
while you danced behind me grass green
and your fingers were stubby and
rounded at the ends they made me think
of primate hands and your hair
was scraggly city dog brown while you
watched my yellow hair art nouveau
with electric ends hot pink fuchsia
robins egg blue soundwave green
curling roving essing on beams
of jagged filtered light white like
when you think of heavenly light

I was shaded as a forest with light
shining through between betwixt red
orange leaves not yet crisped by cold
so that they still feel just as green as
high open pings over outer space
stars oh stars burning bright blue
iridescent moving bumping on one
another dark spaces between spaces of
spaces and sounds like mammal hide
heartbeats stretched taught and tied with
sinew and tendons and marbles of sweat
from more natural hands all one
smooth callous so that the grooves all run together

Can I stand next to you? Your colors are wild, babe.

Autumn Rain Meditations

rain thumping
on shingles white
white skies and rain thick
as London fog so the evergreens
fade in the background like bagpipes
collapsing under the arm of
a graying man playing alone
against pale misty skies over
a slate lake placid daybreak
and the pipes mellow like
a painted dancing snake
golden metallic on a black resin
pottery shard resting in the hand
of a sturdy khakied man in 1923
at an Egyptian excavation site
pick axes pick pick clack on rock
and stone dusty like his pocket
watch once gold metallic as a tooth cap
in the dry mouth of a hallow country man
fishing on a dock alone in the early morning--
or is it the late night? it's still dark after all--
humming something low and rusty
as metal wheels on cobblestones
in old London mildewed as the rotting wood
of old houses once whitewashed as autumn rain

How Smoothly Pulse Our Soul Embers

At the edge of the wood: yellow lapping from blue
on the airy night, as with sound waves in the space between atmospheres,
the moon silvers as it does shine bare white legs onto silty frozen mud;
mud under toenails, braced as January's crust glittering,
and a blithely bare neck turned open to the night--
How places and times are not important and frozen.

4

though years have passed
the water still flows through my fingers
and the sun still shines on my face

feels

Red Willow and Baby Blue: Home Country

noticing patterns in how leaves
fall like sun flakes on autumn’s
pedals

blocking out sounds of traffic
to hear the subtle rustle of
tree murmurs

and there was a tree that had
fallen so it was stopped mid-
way by another and the bottom
broke away and fell away so
the top was suspended on
its own

and there was a tree with its
wrinkly arm wrapped loving-
ly around its neighbor

and every shade of green still
more prominent in late
November

strolling somewhere familiar
and still unfamiliar—
togetherness

alive

thyme burned
to the bottom of a pan
blackened tack
your hot hands
tremble smoking
reds when
you used to smoke
menthols.
give me verbs about
bombs on sand.
tell me when
you have ptsd
that you won't be
totally lost from--

I will try not
to scorch the garlic
when you
kick off your boots--

but then you
tell me that
you could still
be drowning
in Iraqi mud--
pulses through your temples
and then
the air was
red-brown sticky
between the hard
grains whippping--
and I know when
you start yelling
get down get down,
that you don't smell
the marjoram or the salt.
your nostrils flare
like flames on rubber
hum-v wheels.
you look through
me looking at you
to the smoke rising
from the pan, just as
the smoke detector
goes off to bring you
back.

and as you cross
into the kitchen
where I stand wielding
a wooden spoon;
you turn off the burner
and tell me that
you are here because
it got passed to
your brother,
who in his last
remembered the
smell of frying bacon
and maple syrup,
he gripped your vest
hard--

light light light then nothing.

well fed

innards of fishes
marshy fresh silver bodies
wet bear paw swiping

cold streams falling white
along basins of mountains
fall with calls russet

on beams of twilight
sun nestling in behind trees
blackened with shadow

red willow and baby blue journey through the magical forest

drifting
thoughts
as thin and beautiful
as layers of eyelash,

climbed
stairs Of stone
and running water
in Wild eyed wander,

falling through rows
of sky,
caught by a forest hand-
lifted us up
to a face
dressed with dried flowers,

and, kissing God on her lips,
we share the same dream.