Hands in my pockets, I came up with nothing
but keepsakes of dust, a dulled archipelago of air
stretching past my arms . . . night winds galloping
toward the islands at the end of the sea.
                                                                          All that spun
and landed here, turned out to be those like myself,
walking around each morning with our ticket stubs
of intuition, our recent best guesses . . . looking up
through a vacancy of trees to a couple rags of cloud
caught there, dingy blossoms floating branch to
branch.
              Neruda said the stones fell from the sky,
and science backs him up—all our beginnings
blasting out and dropping here or there beneath
the dark. . . .
                      Nothing—not the perfect restatement
of waves nor the borderless dominion of birds, not
the Southern Cross shimmering like a signet of hope—
has saved the least of us in our sleep.
                                                                      Shuffling down
the path in the park, I go on whistling what was once
considered a lively tune, thankful to even be a satchel
of ligaments and bone still able to transact enough chemicals,
one neuron to another,
                                        that I can appreciate the day lilies,
star jasmine, and have some idea about what’s missing
when a streak of grey engraves hosannas of moonlight,
the spindrift off the rocks, anything that sounds
remotely like a prayer
                                       sent into the air to a god who,
in his infinite memory, must know he abandoned us
here—so many self-conscious molecular assemblies—
specs in a starry whirlwind of desire.

Ash ascending the altitudes of dawn—
and all along these tarnished clouds 
have refused to accept our suffering. 
Down a side street, the wind goes on 
tuning its violin, a pizzicato off
the thin strings of hope, a melody 
of dust.
       If you knew anything 
as true as a bird's magnetic heart, 
where wouldn't you be instead of here, 
looking out on the blank grey measure 
of another year, a street lamp 
at the outpost of dusk?
                     All the old failings
circling in the moth-spattered light, 
ones you've held on to so long now 
they just about shine, like the sparrows 
in evening's rusted trees—
                        almost the same
birds above Rincon or Malibu, the trees 
still simmering in that '60s, slow, 
Pacific sun, the glassy waves repeating 
their incomplete sentences about the present, 
and the past—surfboards spiked upright 
in the sand like totems for the last city 
of gold.
       And looking off
in that lost direction, back that far west, 
the string section in the palms picks up, 
and who's that on Coast Highway One, 
blond as Tab Hunter or Sandra Dee 
pulling up to Trancas in a convertible 
Chevrolet?
          If there were angels, 
why would they come forward now 
to acknowledge another complaint? 
And what small comfort could there be 
in their terribly bright memories 
of everything?
              It's the same future
waiting there regardless, unthreading 
through the blue eucalyptus—your guess 
as good as the birds', singing their hearts out 
for nothing but the last crumbs
of daylight pinpointing the small space 
of their lives?
               What use asking what more 
you could ask for. You might as well 
look out there to where they said 
the big picture was and watch the credits roll 
before the bandages and plastic bottles arrive 
on the tide
           with the grainy underbelly 
of industrial light. What's left to contribute 
to the dark? The echo and chum of the waves? 
Only that to confirm the eternal at your back. 
So why not
          pick up this dust-colored feather, 
carry it to your rented room and open the glass 
doors above the river, unclench your fist and let it 
float out in the and direction, as unlikely as luck.

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent

it is before that, and colder:

the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert 
                    the unpainted stairs 
at the back where we squat 
outside, eating popcorn

the edge of the receding glacier

where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far

we are learning to make fire 

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

since feeling is first
who pays any attention 
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate 
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis