Recipient

There is so little
we can understand
truly:
like the writer I met
who was born with one hand:
one beautifully crafted, five-fingered
wonder,
and a stub:
ending abruptly at the wrist,
the terminus of possibility,
an unformed question
in the dark.
In New York:
the woolen left sleeve
hangs just awry, slightly gaping
and dark like a shadow
burned away in a moment
by the thunderous prize
of morning.

Tomorrow the Darkness Lifting

In the morning,
I will slip from your room
With the smell of you in my head –
Pass like a breath from your bed –
Knowing the creak of it will not wake you
As you sleep.
You will ignore me as you ought,
Your dream transporting you
Beyond these shadowy walls
Into the blue flickering night of your soul,
Where you dance naked [...]

From the Puerto Rico Trench

At night, I dream of oceans.
For some (I have been told) they are terrible –
Only dark premonitions of the grave,
Wet, wall-less sepulchers –
And they fear them.
Yet I in my sleep
Go home to the ocean.
At knee-depth I am at my back door,
The silver knob
Loose in my hand.
I encounter the floor
As I do my own –
Sand for [...]

A Knowlegde of Granite

What makes men climb mountains?
There will cross your mind, no doubt, the usual suspects: fame, fortune, the sweet/sour rush of the thrill.  Some will say that man is but a caricature of himself, after all, and with millenia gone by, still repeating his favorite miscalculations and pet fallacies.  “To conquer a mountain is against human nature,” [...]

Haunted Still

She haunted me at first, as if from across the Moors.
I was her Heathcliff, and she the edge-dimmed Catherine of my dreams, lilting through the half-light of my sleeping soul.  I thought of her every moment, waking and non-, and found myself in the red-hot love of 18, too young to know what was happening, too [...]

Baptism

 
I wasn’t so much born as I just followed the water out.
There was the fitful, gnawing struggle of first-time labor, the uncertainty, the cold, weary dread in my Daddy’s eyes as he watched his 19 year old bride suffer an ancient curse in the name of childbirth.  There was the greenish room and sad, stark [...]