(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