the morning is a piece of rhubarb pie.

the evening hides until it’s almost too late.

* * *

Somewhere along the line you learned how to unbutton buttons. Push them. Open them.

Let the starlight in, but not only. To love the starlight, respect it, praise it for swimming in the lake, for its independence.

Moving past you in kitchens, feeling on my fingertips days in this place that will never be spent, and, through desire’s glare like glittering lines of late-afternoon light refracted off the summertime lake, wonder how much they are worth, how that worth will be affected by time. Accrue or depreciate.

* * *

apricots. rum. peat. cream.

* * *

I did look in your eyes. I did wrap my fingers in your hair. I did say I love you. I did know what it meant.

* * *

We both live with music in the next room. The door closed. We won’t say it’s not there if asked, but we don’t put a sign on the door, don’t tell casual acquaintances about its color, how it tastes almost like blood at 3 A.M., how loud it moans, how much louder it can scream, how it whispers always.

life is not a milkshake (poem for the olympics)

the chairman dances, and the council
calls it a lavendar extravagance, a flamingo,
a woo hoo holiday in overpriced pants

as though pandas starving were a lark,
as though carving faces into mountains
was a method of paying ancestral debts

perhaps if he wrapped his head in yellow,
the machines would better obey, the animals
would come when called. the giraffes.

across the border trumpets blare. it’s meant
to cause a hollow feeling in the hurdlers,
and javelin throwers, and 50 yard dashers.

they’re big. the trumpets. and although trained
in heraldry, in incantatory affirmations,
lately they’ve been seen carrying knives.

so the coffee gets cold. the windows rattle,
and on the ice he’s landing a triple dipple,
a whisper ripples through the thronged spectators…