Before you came,
things were as they should be:
the sky was the dead-end of sight,
the road was just a road, wine merely wine.

Now everything is like my heart,
a color at the edge of blood:
the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns,
the gold when we meet, the season ablaze,
the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames,
and the black when you cover the earth
with the coal of dead fires.

And the sky, the road, the glass of wine?
The sky is a shirt wet with tears,
the road a vein about to break,
and the glass of wine a mirror in which
the sky, the road, the world keep changing.

Don’t leave now that you’re here—
Stay. So the world may become like itself again:
so the sky may be the sky,
the road a road,
and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.

Like a foreskin being pulled back, the damask 
reveals – pelvic bowl of pink-fringed shadow, 
dense sweet-meat bloom, coral’d cave, puce 
empyrean with no vanishing point, planetary blush! 
So let me in – where everything is new-born 
and crystalline, paused and protected – into that other 
world, that high-shine place of safety, arranged 
and sparking up like a bower. Almost every day, 
for some moments, I think about him – the black 
stems, thorns that can prick so deeply, whorl 
of serrated leaves, all just beneath, around – still 
gorgeousness – your petal’d cumulus, your constancy – 
helps me live. O rose keep on stunning for me – 
for all us boys who have been ruined by men.

It is really something when a kid who has a hard time becomes a kid who’s having a good time in no small part thanks to you throwing that kid in the air again and again on a mile long walk home from the Indian joint as her mom looks sideways at you like you don’t need to keep doing this because you’re pouring with sweat and breathing a little bit now you’re getting a good workout but because the kid laughs like a horse up there laughs like a kangaroo beating her wings against the light because she laughs like a happy little kid and when coming down and grabbing your forearm to brace herself for the time when you will drop her which you don’t and slides her hand into yours as she says for the fortieth time the fiftieth time inexhaustible her delight again again again and again and you say give me til the redbud tree or give me til the persimmon tree because she knows the trees and so quiet you almost can’t hear through her giggles she says ok til the next tree when she explodes howling yanking your arm from the socket again again all the wolves and mourning doves flying from her tiny throat and you throw her so high she lives up there in the tree for a minute she notices the ants organizing on the bark and a bumblebee carousing the little unripe persimmon in its beret she laughs and laughs as she hovers up there like a bumblebee like a hummingbird up there giggling in the light like a giddy little girl up there the world knows how to love.

When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled to take me
to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
and move more in a body unclouded
by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
songs to her the whole forty-five minute
drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
five minutes back from physical therapy.
She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. Today,
at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
another spine appointment, singing along
to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.

I forget where some of their fingers started, how softly 
some of them ended. But I remember, in particular, 
the fingers of one man. We tumbled in simmering grass 
and he hooked all five behind my bottom teeth, 
then further in, like he was trying to drag a lake. 

Under the rustling sky of a Pennsylvania 
I won’t see again, his shadow was much larger 
than mine—wasn’t it? In the orchards, pale-green fruits 
were starting to ripen, lush as petals. Lush as petals, 
which is a way of saying easily pierced.

Love is not like water I can see the bottom of. 
It’s a mountain’s crags I climb, searching for a vantage point. 
I recall what I’ve let go slack in my palms, the way he bit 
his lip, then mine, how in the best photographs 
of horses, all of their legs hit the air at once.

The bark of a dog in the distance is a rusted door 
as it closes. The gray of the sky outside becomes 
the gray of the sky inside. I forget where some 
of their fingers started, how softly some of them ended.
I light a cigarette and sip my tea. The smoke mingles with the steam.