05 June 2009

12 May 2009

Tennis Bracelets

Tender Is the Night rises
from a desk drawer and I
catch up with you there.
This is a boom time for the manic
depressive memoir (you too bought
a spree of snakebite kits), the kind
you were writing when I knew you,
before you stopped and I went back
to red desert and gas-green lights.

Let’s remember how quickly we came
under neon-streak firefly trajectories,
dead like a story we already knew.
A story that wishes us one more
go around—you call by accident and I
pick up the phone and a tennis racket,
swing backhands, slice you away.
You come through the space
in the catgut anyway.

There is clay and a too tight smile
strung across my face as you pinpoint
that day defined by the sun gilt-edging
storm clouds, every elongated slide
a frictionless shot of memory.
The baseline side to side blurs
to nighttime bracelets of light in the town
below the sanitarium, I know
they’re interlocking, getting closer.

I touch my wrists and you touch your wrists.

Spring Is Sprung

01 March 2009

Last Time

The door left open
Your car parked in the drive
My last invitation.

You looked right in the heart of my eye
As if you were trying to memorize
My face indefinitely
And I did the same with yours as we faced
At the entrance.  A sad long gust swept through
Hushed around the back of my neck and ears
The way your hands once did.

Outside, I looked for indication from the day the sun
Blending with the clouds the grass
On your front lawn neither dull nor shine.

I didn't hear you walk away.
I half expected you to be there, half hoped.  Watching me go
Casting me off to face the rest of the world without you
But I'm glad you didn't.
I could never have left

In the dark, your sad eyes roam towards me in dreams.