Winter Won’t Kill You

But the winter won’t kill you.

Your crystalline face
buried deep in the soil of my soul.

What is the soul,
but everything remembering everything?

I kissed you under a street lamp
in the Upper East Side
around midnight,
got busy with my hands,
you wore tight hot pink panties.

The aristocrats dreamed.

We kissed in a field in Texas.
Always passionate kisses in the throws
of sex.

I was 26 years old when I ran down
the streets of New York City
in my hiking boots
at a six-minute mile pace
with her by my side,
months before we’d meet each other.

Who is she?
Who are you?
What is this?

It’s in the soil.

I don’t think you’re in the City right now.

You may be in Vermont, or that could be
our ghost.

But the winter won’t kill you.

If Memory A River

Each day I go down to drown myself in a river.

Oh, the ethereal wind that stops me.

The contiguous sky, the contiguous sky

and the burned smell of sage brush and damp elm trees.

Not any of this be your body.

Not any of this bring back your life.

But to become your body again,

a consistency to be human.

I forget and return to the river again tomorrow

when the gray dawn breaks

and the lasting scents of winter drive me

from my pain

for a mirrored sense of ritual.

The river says,

“Go and be mortal. Have the heart of the

deer and rabbit. Collect today, learn what

cognizance is. Learn to love. Look and breathe

and sleep. Your memories will be like the moon

floating high in the daylight. Some moments will

be special and some will be out of place.

We will save the Earth. This Earth, it should be

saved.”

Vergoatt’s Continuance

The mind can be quieted

Vergoatt is the name

The distant, continuing one

Sure, the mind can be quieted son

if I put a bullet in it

Left this much for love is pain

as remembrance of Vergoatt’s continuance

Vergoatt is the one forever passing

in between the feelings of us, the loins

my sacred blood under oak trees
spills on the dirt close to sunlight

The corporal dust that’s been gathered
and collected

to make us face time over and over again

Whereas Vergoatt cannot

Thus the Nephilim divined us with love

to exist separately from greater truths
and permanence

Alone In The Distance

I’ve made pilgrimages
back over the roads
we first drove
when we moved to Texas

country roads
between
Fort Worth and Decatur

footnotes of the West

blackbirds up high on wires

brush fields
dust
and hills

yellow horizons and dust again

but driving back across
these roads
cannot erase our moments together

so I look these landscapes
in the eye
and feel them in my heart

every
little farmhouse
alone in the distance

The Gilgamesh Eternal

i can’t have the Universe answer

i am only

only human

tossing rocks to the stars

waiting for aliens and gods to answer

the cycles of suns and moons
are
the vessels of containment

the years do not last because time is
the same
and
eternal

yet the protons still spin
electrons do the dance
and the neutrons make magic that eludes us

being the same and eternal is
the feeling in my heart for you

or again the human

what is left after these sweet computers
go to the heavens?

the ones i chased into the future to find you

the cold hard gray ones

for before them or any after or ever since

i can’t have the Universe answer

and this is all
what your pursed-lip kisses have sheltered

Passing The Crumbs Of Forgiveness

You make me feel like
a scattered fast food meal
from Wendy’s thrown across
a parking lot

Left sparse, picked apart and
sad by an economy car
early on a veiled winter day
at a time
when who would eat that
shit

I know you can forget
but will you forgive?

Who is the leaver of this thing here

the place
in my heart?

It is much more difficult to forgive
the people we leave

and have already let go of

Can you forgive a person you can no
longer hold?

Could
we ever hold Jesus to begin with?

The Way I Wear My Hair

Everyday without you
I wake up
and try to decide
what I should do with my hair,
how I should wear it.

Should I cut it?
Does it need a trim?
What if I cut it all off?

I would not be plagued with these
remembrances.

But only for a short time.

Then when it was time again
to cut it all off
I’d have to remember why I
was cutting it all off,

cause I don’t want to have to
think about what it’s like
to wake up everyday and
think about how I would or should
wear my hair before your eyes
that are no longer around
to look at the way I wear my hair.

Saidness

You move on me, not like a mirror,
but like daylight.

A dying man’s life was really a day,
one long day of life,
watch the sky open, watch the sky close.
This cloudscape belongs above Montana.

You step in me, not like mud,
but like river,
unlike the cat chase of Mohenjo-Daro,
unlike the Martian meteorites.

The turquoise from the jewelry-makers of God
I take from your eyes
and hold onto the colors of day.
There — life is frozen. 

O Antarctica, only you have beaten time,
or so
the foreign-exchange students
from the mermaid-lands
have told me.

I love you, football, tender, tender.

Ghosts Of The Great Heart

I woke up
to a sexual dream
about a middle-aged woman from my
childhood
so
naturally I spent the morning
reading about Emily Dickinson
until the birds
began to chirp
and sunlight came
to my room like
water’s farthest journey
upon the universe of beach

I laid on the other side of breathing

crested in sand and spent of light air

then I remembered you were dead

so
I gave up these breaths

to enter the regular day

the one without the ghosts of

the great
great
heart

My Galactic Journey Cometh

I’m looking for the cashier at Target
to save me

I look because my heart hurts
and it’s way too late
in my life for this

I was supposed to be
on board a skiff
in the Mediterranean
at this point in the game

So I look for the child
who’s thrown a temper tantrum
left a pile of spilled popcorn
in the parking lot

I know he’s still with me
whistling along in make-believe

That’s why I can’t pass
the toy section
without looking

that’s why I cannot pass

Those gilded afternoons
without responsibility
the ones with Janis Joplin’s deep blues
they keep beckoning me
to leave this place
to leave this planet

my fleshen hands
by the soil the flowers the tears
the mourners

my galactic spaceship

my ticket
my journey