The Runner
“A man too gentle gets left behind.” Nancy Schoenberger The roads go on, ending only in reduced images. Running is my way of returning to a place, to this room infused with foliage, the street lights merged in a single lamp. Already you are awake. I lean to kiss your waist, the muscles like spreading water, but skin is anonymous. I am spared my face. Only later will we need words the spaces between them, a distance we must try to cover.
Dumb Supper
Again, I ask for you. The table is set. Your plate waits for its portion of face. I wait for the silence to be broken like bread, for the proof of your fingers upon spoons. I light a match and lamps hurl their nets across the room, walls become lace, veils filtering the focused silence of a swarm. Love is the smoked hive, the honey. I remember your arms, the strained veins of petals, the balanced bloom of your body I pressed my mouth to, your face flushed with stings. Tonight my hands smell of flowers crushed upon cloth, the shirts stiff with knowledge of your body. In the short-circuited sign of my window, each star is a letter not lit long enough to form words.
From The Dark
Waves recede and rise. I watch a surfboard on its quick descent, children tumbling from the slick grey stairs. All our climbing comes to this: The pine tree sways, its tiered green reaching nothing, and the stump, like a cone thrown in a pool, the spread of its rings blending into earth. Still, it will last the whole night, dry enough for burning. We break it beneath our boots like a new trail, stack it into piles, markers that will lead us from the dark.
