Quiet one, you whisper to me with a laden heart,
And your words break upon my ear
Like an atom of fog, dissolving into day.

I’ve fallen for a woman I’ve never seen;
That is, if eyes are the only source
That vision gives,
And the heart the body does not outlive.

O, your eyes, I’ve gone so long
Without their gaze, passed
So many nights beneath
Slate skies hewn from stoney
Evenings, witnessed
All the earth’s fury in an orange

My heart says,
“Give her all that you are and you will become
More than you have ever been.”

My mind says,
“Learn from the past.”

I am sorry that it is so hard
For me to leave you;
I fear that it is too easy
For you to leave me
And that I must linger
In your beauty like
A sunbather catching
The final strands of afternoon.

I want to spend my days with you,
purchase a lifetime’s worth of kisses,
and invest my poetry
in your womb

I want to be brief. I want
To have the shape of a boomerang,
Go far off, return, spin wild,
Dangerous, beautiful shapes
In the air; I want to be powerfully small

I am a fire in the fountain, I am a lantern
Swaying in sunset, I am the Four Corners
Facing in and facing out, I am a wind

To you, the sudden hope outlined in lips,
I ask the question that fear had ne’er touched:
What myth does explain life’s dance upon a crypt,
The unreal made real, the lost firmly clutched?

Despair stabbed me on the way to delight:
Its jagged blade, forged of hardened tears,
Shore off the jasmine fragrance of the night,
Postponed the puissant dawn for another year.