Another Canvas / new poems 2011

Concerning Crows, Elucidating Undertows

thrill me
with theories
you keep hidden

concerning
crows

elucidating
undertows

languishing there
behind your coy lips
without the benefit
of your tongue's fey lisp

whisper
discourse

spit
rhetoric

incite
debate

compare
contrast
defend

before the crow takes flight
from a sky left contemplating
an undertow of silence below
sweeping our love out to sea

a finding of loss
no thesis or dissertation
could ever dare to explain

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

If Only

the cold gray of dusk always fills my mind
with muted, faint memories that stand silently
in the last of my shadow's fading outline, yawning,
before they themselves retreat back into the darkness
there at the edges of, "If only..." and "Remember when..."

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

Ask The Dust

After the rain, the mud,
came the sun-baked dust
along an avenue of trees,
whispering what it was,
before I could ask
if this was, at long last,
summer beneath my feet,
hovering above my head,
laid out like a landscape
by a Plein-Air painter.

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

Confetti

gluing again
together again
scattered pieces of a
paper heart

walk a rocky world
looking for scraps
secreted away
by jealous winds

cut across
a collage of emotions
with scissors for decisions
cutting blood ties

no longer
torn and afraid,
I throw confetti
to the fire I called friends

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

Now As Unreal

my grey
father
sitting there,

a comfortable
chair
for a kingdom;

the world
outside
the window

now as unreal
as a child's
crayon drawing.

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

In The Absence Of All Influence

in the absence
of all influence
i climb inside
a self-made
self,
and sit securely
in the sinecure
of a self-reliant
self,
suffice it to say
a self-satisfied,
self

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

Of Our Occasional Congress

I have nearly outrun myself, although the version of me I left behind,
in the burned out bunker of a marriage, does still walk this earth;
- shaken, stunned, and scarred; ashen, uncertain and ashamed -
alone but not alone, adrift but not adrift and not altogether forsaken,
for we indeed still talk from time to time in cautious conversations
carried on in a quiet mind, between the beats of our Siamese heart
where no one can glimpse the content of our occasional congress.
There, in the telepathy of emotion, a historical and less hysterical
fiction has been constructed to bridge the gaps of a conjoined annal,
so that I may know the complete continuity of myself on either side
of the imaginary, invisible, yet indelible line I drew between us both,
leaving behind a shell of a man for the chimera I cannot fully shed.

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

I Part The Lemongrass

sifting the seasons for respite, calm, surrender,
i part the lemongrass, thrust my once young face
into summer's warm wind, into autumn's dull decay,
into winter's low light, into spring's green garden,
discovering a cache of old promises built upon
premises of constant movement, perpetual motion,
and in stark contrast to my old soul's
complete indifference to kinetic progress;
finding more in the simple, narcotic fragrance
of the overgrown lemongrass at my stationary feet,
inhaling a reverie of still, stolid, and salient reflection
upon a quiet found future tucked into a cotton pocket
for purposes of safekeeping from the cruel of a calendar
and its marked, methodical and ironic disregard for time
and the promises a young man had no time to keep.

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

The Sancho Panza Of My Soul

I stop to crane my albatross neck back across a broad and bruised shoulder,

spy the shadows of a doubt that walked a wincing sleepwalk
behind every battered, broken-hearted and bushwacked mile,

shrug and smile, out of breath, but breathing free at last or perhaps just for now,

knowing by their silhouetted stepping impressions/compressions
in sand and loam, clay and soil and the hot tar of not yet pumice,

that dreams can chase you down even in the wide awake of running from the past.

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

Other Flowers

petals soft push
against

other flowers

rising out of rock,
slipping through stone.

"can't" has always been there,
below the surface,
whispering doubts through ash.

"couldn't" waited
impatiently,
pouted broadly below my feet,

as I picked
this bouquet for you
of me.

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

None Of What Happened, Happened (for Charles Maxwell Anderson)

i can still feel
the bricks of a house
built along the rise of,
not atop, a hill

i can still see
boys in a short driveway
standing around in
KISS makeup

i can still hear
your father's records
through the floorboards
of your room

i can still smell
your mother's cooking
through open windows
of carefree summers

i can still summon
these senses and dream
that none of what happened,
happened

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

Joli Comme Un Coeur (As Pretty As A Heart)

soft vowels spill
from the pout of
your lips

my tongue
tied
to the crack and tick
of consonants
counting time
in between time
until I see you again

le temps entre
punctuated by
periods of pining

spent chiseling words
into the granite of hours
without you

that read,
Joli Comme Un Coeur,
within their own stippled heart,
cleaving to one another
in the same way your lips'
whispered caress, "Je t'aime,"
has clung to my own

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

Yellow Becomes Blue

a little boy in bed.
the wall between us breathes his name.
incandescent light breaks softly across my neck.
its yellow becomes blue when he speaks, when I dream.
at night, in the quiet and absence of color we wait, but not in vain.
these boys in bed connected by the red of blood on either side of this wall.

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

You Can't Go Home Again

there was a melody
and it played so sweetly,
hovering above a childhood me
and the suggestion of Autumn air
ushered in by a sure descending dusk
of a September day slowly closing its eyes

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

Grope (for WMG)

we rise through the thrashing of our births and wade the mud-rise in our mouths

across the calendars of Winter feral cold, Spring soft cautious sublime, Summer stone lizard heat,

Autumn color forgetting almost every August, and so august we are as we climb through old bones,

propping Faberge dreams on the tips of our intentions and balance our will and our worth all at once

as we stand in the sands that were made in the time we stood dumbfounded by our own existence,

those mountains before us now beneath our feet were never as much obstacle as our uncertain selves

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

Of Goya, Of Borges, Of Pixinguinha

through these blinds
a painted snake of light, in sections,
crawls across a shadow wall with the sun
to escape the cold of this white hot winter -
the same sun bathing colonial window boxes
across the tropics, overhead in a southern hemisphere's summer,
and I am bitten by this daydream - of Goya, of Borges, of Pixinguinha -
venom sweating sand, warm rain and cigar smoke into this February room

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

Anodyne Of Air

mellifluous was the morning

no nicotine crutch hobbling
the rhythm of soft samba light

pure gesso snow falling
in 2/4 time

gray anatomy ,
a wallflower lining the horizon,
resigned

the Goya reds, yellows, pinks, greens
and even blues find favor
in this new canvas I don

dawn's sweet tones
painting possibilities
with a cardinal's song
in the cold anodyne of air
i breathe sweetly at last

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

Gutters

there's a parade -
there's always a parade

years piling up
against the barricades
held in a loose and tenuous grip
by a thousand failing men

turn corners
turn calendars
turn channels

and keep your memories
in technicolor if you wish,
for the nights you cannot count
are forever black and white

filled with forgotten teenage boys
turned grey by middling age
and left to clean the debris
of abandoned fanfare
littering gutters

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

How A Heart Sings (for George Baker)

the air is rich,
warm

slow to come,
but there

hovering,
carrying comfort
to a sterile room

breathing life
into languid blood
still cold from a curious sleep

where she
ran fingers through your hair
and whispered,
not yet

the heat of her breath
still lingering across your face,
as you awake

the sun more sure
in a sky hiding her
and a waxing crescent

oh, how a heart sings
for here, for her, for now

lingering a while longer
in the timely warmth
of a winter reminded
of a coming spring

Another Canvas / new poems 2011

And Tomorrow

morning star reveals the silent, slow march of elephant years

failing grey memories sit hushed in the dull green of matted rushes

fogged dew reminds the breaking day of yesterday's clear cut choices

another new sun warms the stones above the buried cold blue of remembrance