TOMALES
Came out last night.
It was snowing on the moon.
Pretty hard too.
Gusting about
like a room full of laundry
looks when you’ve lost something
in it.
Down here, I’m drinking splits,
looking at the road map.
Everything here is relative.
The moonlight on the beer foam,
bubbles rising like the stars.
The storms ease on the moon.
I ease out the back door
to look at the night again. Huge
drifts of snow slide through
the sky. I am amazed by
the intensity of the storm.
The moon moves across the back
of a fog bank.
Fingers of wind make noises,
almost music, across the tops
of the beer bottles.
__________________
I WOULD MAKE NOISES DEEP
in my throat that sounded
so unlike anything I knew
that I would scare myself.
I became ceremony in sound.
A whirl of phlegm, crackling
and sputtering up from the
rooms I guard against time
and her dancing princesses.
A quaking, as if a bear suddenly
came into the room on hind
legs and performed the crushing
of an arm as if it were a
dance and she the music.
Now, autumn pushes clouds
ahead of itself with a yard
full of leaves, I hear these
same sounds again issue
from their scraping across
the drive and think them
a familiar music, something
treasured, like a Nocturne by
Chopin remembered by the fingers
long after the mind has forgotten
the specificity of the notes and rests.
It is a rustling of lace
in a room draped with silences.
___________________
LA NOCHE
It bothers me
that the night
is outside minding its own
business while I am
in my room half
expecting you to appear
in the bed next to me.
You, with your brow arched,
surprised to have been
shipped across the night
like so much luggage;
the white roses of sleep
still in your skin.
I would be as surprised.
Hello? It would be like
saying hello to
myself on this late August
night, where the voices
of dogs are so small
in the distance, that my breath
seems huge. no, hellos
would never do.
The dark just outside the
window waits for me to put
the lights out. It has ways
of getting to me, of opening
the dreams like oranges
and spilling these thoughts
of you all around me,
before I can catch a glimpse
of you shuttling across the
night air, not alarmed
at all by this thinking
it is just the changing
of the season that causes
these things. not alarmed
by the love of it. not at all.
Knowing you will wake up
far away from this room,
the night being busy
with so much else. with
traffic and dogs and things
of its fabric as to
make such journeys a
matter of reaching to the end
of the bed and pulling
another blanket up above
your shoulders.
__________________
