Conversations (XII) — to pictures I’ve not taken
Your face. The moon through the branches of days.
Morning sprouts from the top of the tree
And brings light down to earth.
Conversations (XII) — to pictures I’ve not taken
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Category Archives: Poetry
Conversations (XI) — to the empty space in the tree
Conversations (XI) — to the empty space in the tree
Don’t tell me anything: You are the tree.
In a patch of years I forgot to climb
My life turned like a leaf stem.
Even in this fragile spinning
The memories of cicadas sing.
The underground sky feeds me.
Conversations (X) — to the houses
Conversations (X) — to the houses
When we are asleep, after talk and touch,
And the music of your voice, even in my mind,
Has drifted into the blanketing silence
And there is nothing left but the breathing
Of our separate souls, then the houses
Begin to sing. Across the ways out
And the ways home that only houses know
They sing, houses who’ve never seen
The other’s siding or heard rain pelt
The other’s roof, but have shared
The job of sheltering us. Their song
Builds a new house for us we will never move
Out of, a bed always comfortably unmade,
A dog growing old sleeping in the corner,
A piano by the screen door, waiting.
Conversations (IX) — to duende (via Lorca)
Conversations (IX) — to duende (via Lorca)
The bed of the earth extends to the ends
Of sheet-swept seas.The reasonings
Of mountains the resting place
For flocks of wishes in the empty trees,
The hollowness of hope their strength
To rise for nights of countless flight.
A rolling vessel rested in a calm, went on
Along the pale compass of your wrist.
It was never lie or lay.
There was never one direction.
Conversations (VIII) — to one haunted by a ghost
Conversations (VIII) — to one haunted by a ghost
The key worked. The locked door opens.
I cannot see the word that troubles you.
Empty bottles line the windows. Looking
Out you are still looking in and the inward
Look is contained and darkens as
Sometimes when a word mispronounced
Shakes its muzzle loose unleashes itself
From its owners’ meaning and ends
Up meaning more as in what I am
Thinking of you away from this ghost
Conversations (VII) — to the distance
Conversations (VII) — to the distance
Cicadas, deafening in the black oak.
But invisible. Turn the mind down:
It’s a late August still life.
Above the heart’s yard, all my chattering thoughts,
An invisible chorus, can’t travel the distance.
Conversations (VI) — to the future
With eyes closed I can hear you smile.
Your voice a place I know my way around.
Woodpeckers say goodnight the strangest way
And other birds of winter appear as singular
Leaves of gray, blue, gold on the trees
We can only see through their nakedness.
I drop your eyelids’ map of dreams:
Everything you are I still don’t know
Runs through my veins
Like the flight patterns of birds
that never have to know the route
Conversations (V) — skin, to skin
Conversations (V) — skin, to skin
I am the space before your voice is heard.
You’re the breeze that remembers every leaf’s name.
I am the weary road you know will take you home.
You are the river that sways the nimble oars.
A raspy sunrise. Whisper pleasant friction:
Your lips’ lines on my palm are not a fiction.
Conversations (IV) — to Dylan Thomas
Conversations (IV) — to Dylan Thomas
It’s because I love my love can’t be cut
Like a river by rocks, bent branches swift
Over stone misshapen or promises broken
On swerve. Because I love I love this soul alone
And am given immunity against the foamy drift,
And the heart’s wheel’s rims to resist the rut,
The charter to tax all the pennies of loss,
The unplanted ghost come off the cross.
Conversations (III)
Conversations (III)
You can send me fractions.
The shattered pagoda of memory blasts
Back into place and the splinters
Spiral into a soft round kiss.
We’re half shade and half sun
And never fully half, holding
A hymn hands can’t tear
To pieces, or sing solely.
Translations from the English 