Three Poems


1


That hour of return has arrived
that haunt of heaviness 
settling as the plane circles
the busy island like a moth 
spiralling relentlessly
into a black hole of flame

all that I left behind
the scattered remnants of my family
from Oregon to Texas
Anchorage to Chama
weigh in like angina 

the pale orange moon
rising into a smudge of smoke
under the silent power lines
the distant voice barking orders
to a child unseen, manic
unmistakably white southern english
marring the placidity
of this guy and his son
thumping a soccer ball back and forth
over the cracked earth
with its slow black crickets

the manicured lawns, trimmed trees
little metal security signs
posted like an invitation
the stricken inhabitants 
reclining before televisions
in the drained evening
exhausted from running
from heat to AC
car to house, mall to car
from fear of sweating
to cold beds of terror
they finally liquefy before the game
Rangers and Royals at Dallas
three strikes and you're out
or was that my third wine cooler?


All that I have left behind
weighs more than the body of my life
as I walk behind a woman in black
with checkered black stockings
whose stiletto sex can be tasted
with imagined honeymoon tongue
down the escalator
to the baggage claim carousel
torture of grating steel
groaning under samsonite
the bo of the aikido men
the tons of underwear and socks
and assorted vacation accretion
the weight of soon to die dream
as nothing has more mass
even in anticipation










2


The wind is blowing
very much as it did before
but I am sweating
whenever we touch
sleep is a vapor

I keep dipping into you
with a tentativeness that delights

I love you makes sense
but why belabor it
I love you can be good
or bad, or for the time
being as it is now
that I feel it

on the relative scale 
of my imponderables
I love you












3


So many prayers rejected
or silence made all the deeper
by playing our recording
of an extinct o'o years later
in the Alikai swamp
its voice disembodied floating
through the mist and ferns
frightening all the birds
so that they stop singing
they had long known him dead
and now his song resounds
captured on cheap tape
so that were he alive
he would hear himself
and die of despair