1.
A boy & his first love
like a glimpse of a foreign city
on a far horizon.
2.
What brought you
down the old French road
as I, an old man, bled life
from my skull, your eyes
all the grace of mercy
& tenderness, perhaps
more love than anyone
could know in such
desperation, reaching
for your light as the world
seeped from me.
& from there,
we would meet many times again.
3.
Honestly, it seems helpless,
like sprockets in a machine
& we must mesh & rotate
in other directions, sync
with other gears, eventually
rotating back & turning
away again, this machine
that got running somehow
& nobody can turn it off.
4.
& honestly, when people
say love, they want some
thing for themselves. Love
ends up taking more than it
gives, it is its own machine &
punishing rewards. I can’t
make it up to you, nor
you to me. I can’t carry this
iron on my back another step,
this inheritance bequeathed me
by I don’t know what. By me?
5.
I see you enclosed in petals
that won’t open. In pointed
teeth that clutch you without
biting all the way down.
& now I stand watching, helpless,
as the life drips from you,
knowing, perhaps, that there’s
a way out, that the wounds
aren’t permanent, that the snare
paralyzing you is made of dust.
But my mouth moves & you
hear no words, I call & there’s
no one there to listen.
6.
You stand lovely in a white gown
under a palm on the sands
& each kernel is a crystal ball
where a camel marches deeper
& deeper into sands of crystal.
7.
If only I could be there,
the boy thinks, seeing the city.
If only I could leave behind
this nowhere town. If only I
could cross, I’d walk there.
& so he left, & he’s walking still.
8.
There you sit, a little girl
with her red dress frills,
your sensitive fingers &
petite feet. Your index tip
draws along the enormous
pink peony’s edge, a rosy,
fresh aroma awakens you.
You spy a tiny ant crawling
down into its welter of petals
to sip the nectar.
9.
hear my prayer
and come
to my
severities
Sappho
Perhaps I’m still that boy
who tried to love you,
& has never been able to stop.
How did I see you as if
the Pleiades lived in your hair?
As if the sparrow would
land in your palm?
Was I always wrong?
I’ve long wandered
in this hall of mirrors,
this masque for existential
bumpkins. How you touched me
through these spiraling lives
like intersecting rings
in multiple pools. I can’t
save you, revoke what
came before, or even
send you away. I only wish
you could see what I see
when I look inside you
& hear the deep night
rain & touch the silk
in your thoughts. Like a
dragonfly alights on
a razor blade, I’ve come
once more to revisit
that place of sudden
love for a stranger
truer than everything
that came before
or after.
Boulder,
8/10-11/20
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