Last night
you look

at me hard
then soft

like you see
something

old and sad
in me.

^{for Maya}

We meet at a coffee shop. So much time has passed and who is time? Who is waiting by the windowsill? We make plans to go to a museum but we go to a bookshop instead. We’re leaning in, learning how to talk to each other again. I say, I’m obsessed with my grief and she says, I’m always in mourning. She laughs and it’s an extension of her body. She laughs and it moves the whole room. I say, My home is an extension of my body and she says, Most days are better with a long walk. The world moves without us—so we tend to a garden, a graveyard, a pot on the windowsill. Death is a comfort because it says, Transform but don’t hurry. There is a tenderness to growing older and we are listening for it. Steadier ways to move through the world and we are learning them. A way to touch your own body. A touch that says, Dig deeper. There, in the ground, there is our memory. I am near enough my roots. Time is my friend. Tomorrow is a place we are together.

If I heard the words you once used

in our wild place rough with scrub roses

in sand—if your words came back

gray and kind as mild winter

believe me I’d still understand

offer my own red language

my tongue to your tongue

so we recall what we once said

that made us live

                        made us choose to live

If I heard the words you once used

in our wild place rough with scrub roses

in sand—if your words came back

gray and kind as mild winter

believe me I’d still understand

offer my own red language

my tongue to your tongue

so we recall what we once said

that made us live

                        made us choose to live

Not the bottle

Not the burn on the lips

lit throat glow

Not even wild     really

but a small-town bird

whose burgundy throat

shimmers like nothing ever

A huge bird    impressive

who lurches and stalks me

window to window in this

desert retreat

What does he want?

Clearly he is lonely

pecks his reflection

and speaks to it in a low gubble

(not gobble) gubbles so tenderly

Soon as I think of him     his eye hits on me

We have watched each other for days

His shifting colors fascinate me  his territorial strut

But it is his bald and blue-red head

his old man habits and gait that move me

If I even think of him        I taste whiskey

Drunk on solitude    I’d talk to anybody

I try his language on my lips

His keen response burns     like shame