I was up in the stacks, picking at
a scab done in blank verse, I was
gazing blankly at lone/level sands,
I saw you floating in ginger down
aisle after aisle of carrion, carrying
red beacon light from a head halo,
I saw a book suddenly snapped, I
saw you in blurs of blue metaphor,
I was up against you in an aisle, I
took you into a kind of castle that
was really a closet, in castle/closet
we were magically welded to rivers
we were dirt to Browning in greens
catch the wind sail and spin way up
I woke to the sound of rain's gong
I saw that the desert had melted

I dream endlessly of days
of unreflecting love.
I make my heart skip beats,
brain go soft, gut get lean, all
for unreflecting love. The books
don't say how to get there.
The gurus are stumped. All talk
of love reflected upon.
Years have passed, nothing
like it in sight. Sometimes I
get by, looking at kids'
books. Unreflecting love lives
there. Then, the book shuts,
the heart. Nothing left to dream
of but unreflecting love. Dreams,
reflections, gone not reflecting.

            for mary harju

laughter rises from (concentrate!) throats
      in depths, de profundis; cushions w/ sheets
w/ floral patterns & wind rushes in;
streets surreal w/ coffee-shops (open at eleven),
      so we go, get coffee, a brownie, sit
on curb / baltimore ave. near clark park--
we hit it-- slides, grim metal
      fence, against park-lavatory walls
mary's lips taste like sweet brandy--

most remarkable you loved a world
that nailed you like a too-vivid portrait
(red, blue, green) to soot-blackened
walls; that this love kept showing up
in poems like gold-rinded oranges;
that you kept it, always, close at hand.
stuck in thorn-bushes the length
of america, i look for this love
(fruit, flesh) inside myself, find
steel-hewn indifference, implacable,
endless, & america its faithful
mirror (informer, accomplice).
thus, all relation is blocked, unless
i peel you away & swallow your seeds. . .

Twelve long years, with the length
of all that time squeezed into a
universe that hovers between us,
as I knock back a third Jack and
Coke and you stir your Jameson,
as our eyes meet and I re-read in
my head what I wrote in a journal
twelve years ago: "two-faced,
mannish, and frigid." That's our
universe: words scrawled in the
heat of undecided passion, which
resolved in the submissive caresses
of another. Yet they hover there,
still undecided because I bet you
kept a journal too, and a good
one, and if you didn't well then
our universe isn't much, I don't give
a shit about the coyness that
can’t be squeezed without stress,
and I'll find another mistress.