Toro Nagashi

 on Albuquerque Bridge, Sasebo

Beneath, a spirit moves.
There are angels in the tangle
Of lanterns, lost in glow.
From the shore, furins
float jangles-
chime, hesitate, echo.
Beams of beacons slide slow
as the onset of a dream.

Elsewhere, a range of rhododendron
and not this spread of wraiths.
What river is this?
With a swim of light so real,
it must be illusion,
and nothing stirs watchers
watching moonbeams?
Sasebo. We are distant.

Now, cherish--
The luminaria sink and swell
in a miracle,
zephyrs cross east,
currents switch stream,
shadow dances flash
To turn thoughts ancestral.


Where as we, distracted,
dwell in Limbo,
they resurrect in stratums:
white gold on indigo.

Oymyakon

The only way to see it, they say,
Is as white desert.

To think each breath a memory of heat
You may never feel again, and hold.

I picture the point where the calyx
Of an alyssum stems from white

Into a full spectrum of colour.
But all is ultraviolet here

And the only separation,
Brief sun before a day of night.

Anhedonia. The slow freeze doubles.
Iced rivers run through me.


                       

Braille

Having lost the space around me,
I have been handed new language.

Not latin. More a mosaic of curves,
A map you must touch to perceive.

I scale over crevices of code,
Fingertip through creases and valleys

To find the bend where continents slip
Off the edge of themselves, to ocean.

Helicopter Seed

 after rainstick

How the heart shaped helicopter seed
is her heart in the silverlight of dawn
paints the scene a pageantry. A blessing.

Her flail, both furious and delicate,
falls blizzard-like in the haze of a hurricane
(where storms become the love of storms)

and lets fly, rises and spreads wing
so that what happens next is a joy
we could not know to hope for:

an effusive half-stop of descent,
lost in atmosphere, holds- then releases-
as if a shift in the everlong of life.

Lady Venice

Tonight, I have come to lie in her arms.
It is not the melancholy of her beauty
Or the rèmo'd slow-brush of ripples
That make this city heart-breaking.
Our reflections swell as they take us in.

Yet, how are we to claim possession
Of our own existence as the mirrors
Of her canal fold beneath us,
And buildings sink where they stand?
We succumb to the archipelago's chagrin.

Transient sailor, Serenissima, Holy Lady:
Something in the way your daydream
Makes an auster of the breeze
Sends our thoughts to the artesian well
And paints you a widow, or a widow's daughter.

So. Since she is only touched by death,
I will etch my name here in limestone
On a San Michele sideboard tomb
And submerge in the inevitable flood.
Tonight, I have come to lie in her arms.

Shelter

Decided on there not being a voice,
she instead lay each veil against mine
silently. Within a breeze.
A breeze born in thoughts of Pacific warmth,
sailing through each sun-dappled stranger
like a wish wished and suddenly gone
until hitting the cold stone reality
of a hand ball alley back in Mullaghmore-
where we sat, huddled and smothered.

Our backs to the ballast of an unused cockleshell
we were soon to be grateful of,
as another ocean wave made large
over the courtside wall in a sluice of hostility
and splashed the port side rust,
echoing the diminuendo of shelter,
in an upturned rainstick's vaulted tunnel
only we knew had ever existed.

Anamnesis

Creosote tar, ashen silt on asphalt,
the creak of an oak falling far off
being the cry of her in love. Remember
this when the wheels fall off,
when the keel shifts slow to dock

and night removes from dusk.
Day does not bring these tragedies
home. And you, still in love
yet distant in the shadow of love,
blank as a snow drift drifting.

Covered by the truest daze, steady,
and not the last of the many
that would not be enlightened:
Noah in the flood, Moses on the rock,
Jesus launching his slanted syllables.

What love will you bring to the city?
Falling towers? Light?A spring dawn
on the nape your neck?
Solar panels will flash and hum
to complete the lunar silence.

Backward of her, love is the wet
of a fuck on an April lawn,
where torture bears name and green
is the only shade that separates.
Fully in the whims of her youth,

now recalled with you there.
Her breath flailing like cursive,
italicised in the hush of a breeze.
Distant, distant, distant.

Trade

Take me away and drop me in another shape.
I'll be that silhouette down at Lambourn of the
groom boy waking to his passion's passion.
The dawn of day painting me black against
the rising sun, taking over every living thing.

Then, have him melt down his whip to a stump
with a tilted tip so he can drown it in this well.
Show him here, crouched, taking on my shadow
as the silver of the moon and all things dappled
fall to climb upon canvas, spilling a new world.

Sleep Storm

I wake to her small breaths
Assaulting my neck

Each a separate raid
In a new language

Night troopers
Traipsing whispers

Pacific zephyrs
Assassins of silence

Both victorious and defeated-
I inhale a sleepy love

Métro

Unknowingly, I swept through
the cloud of a breath you left behind
and turned toward the muffled hum
of the métro. Half flailing, half steady.
My head tucked in recognition.

Above, Paris cool in November's grip.
Notre Dame standing still as Hades
over the underearth like a gothic god.
Each ebb and flow an extension
of the evernumb parisienne Winter.

Below, sifts of heated rubber lift.
The underground rumbles murmur
and slip-stream to the darkness
of places they neither were nor will be -
but pass through. Blue, silver, low lit.