Travel Tale

Nobody can sleep in a room in the renovated hotel’s fourth floor
because the lovers have not left. The businessman before dinner

finds the sheet thrown to the foot of the bed and before he knows
what he is doing he is stepping over jeans, socks, a bra, a colorful

dress that smells of flowers and wine, none of which can be seen
with the eye, but the businessman has seen love before, he has spent

many nights in rooms like this and he respects the lovers.
He does not remake the bed. He hangs his jacket on the chair

and lies face down on the open bed, absorbing the singular scent.
He cannot sleep, the bed is too busy, he hears breathing

and the ascent of a name new on her lips. The wind moans outside
Because it would like to lay quietly across a small landscape

The size of a sheet and rest, too. The man wipes a tear, gets up.
Later, over dinner, he makes the biggest deal of his career.

Groundswell

A fleet of winter flowers
Sails out over the brown ocean

To war. None will come back
But their song is light.

*

When a thing grows where we think
it shouldn’t, we have misunderstood

Its nature, or the environment
It grew in, or both.

*

Tell me about the mountain stream,
Cloud chasing cloud like a fleet

Of winter flowers. A song as light
As rain has reached our roots.