Your Beard
I imagine you,
Ten years old and lying in your bed,
On a single mattress with white cotton sheets,
The breeze blows the window’s curtain open,
Letting in the cool night air, smelling of ozone.
You take one small fingertip,
Your skin bathed, new and soft,
Smelling of Ivory soap and clean fingernails,
You touch your jaw, pressing in to discover the structure of your body,
Your face, the muscles, the epidermis, the blood, the pores,
You touch, wishing to find hair, sprouts whirling to the surface,
The smallest beard resting on your chin like a crown.
You are a prince,
You have traveled distances,
And now you rest between, always between,
36 years later, you stroke your chin,
Eking out the differences between child and adult.
I’ll not hunt a pelt for you,
I’ll not take your dream and cover you with it tenderly,
With you smoothing, caressing your warm flesh,
Wanting so much.
You’ll find it between day and night,
Between fragments of time,
Jumbled until linearity is unimportant,
The ozone of thunderclap and change,
Lifting you, a growling bear,
Face raised and hair bristling,
Your beard growing, growing.
You lying in your bed,
Me, touching your jaw with my bathed fingertip,
The graying crown,
We are kings.
Bunny Heart
There is a horse in the clearing,
A cloud in the sky,
A wave on the shore,
And each stands for the unspeakable;
I am heartless.
And by that I don’t mean without a heart,
But my heart is so bloated with anger, loss and memories,
That it is a black sore,
Hardly recognizable as an organ of love.
I want to lay down with the horse,
Nestled against its fur and warmth,
A forest bunny covered in damp leaves,
Looking upwards at the clouds,
My eyes cups of tears and my ears twitching,
My heart opening in waves,
Liquid streaming like salt water, like blood, like everything I forgot,
Pumping, pumping open.
Sunday at Orphan Andy’s
8 am on a Sunday morning,
We walk to Orphan Andy’s for eggs and toast,
Down Market Street – the night still clinging to us,
The violet wash of dawn shimmers over the dirty sidewalk,
We are careful not to step in unintended consequences,
Watching our words as they murmur from our lips like steam.
Once in the diner,
We order from the waiter in the kilt,
With a studded belt spelling “naked”,
Everything makes me think of your ass,
So I gulp coffee and change the subject.
Your ass is my unintended consequence,
And I mince through this swamp of desire carefully,
Like one of those queens from around the corner,
Lifting my sequined skirt to avoid any mess,
It is no use – my words are frippery;
Pats of butter from rare cows living two miles from Stonehenge.
And each sentence is a nothing.
Eating our toast nibbly – quickly,
We prepare to leave Orphan Andy’s,
Get the check from the kilted waiter,
Rushing forward and home,
The yellow sun rising over our bed,
Like a schmaltzy greeting card,
Illustrating socialism with women bending over crops in the fields,
Or maybe just crops, and I bend over,
My ass and your ass and unintended consequences flying like birds,
I bend over.
Pandemonium
Am I inconsolable or incomprehensible,
With your fingers inside of me,
Curled like a bird claw, something flying,
And I on the edge of the bed, the edge of the falling sky,
Holding my breath inside,
And then letting go with clamor of noise,
Flapping wings fluttering from my mouth,
A pandemonium of need.
A puffery of noise flying over the wires at night,
Miles away across mountains and water,
And you tell me that it will be weeks.
90 days before you are here again,
My heart is a nothing bird,
A skeleton with no organs inside,
And I listen for you slicing through the air like starlight,
Our mouths open to one another.
