"I didn't notice you for a beauty, the first time we met," you said.
"Hush!" said your friends. "Don't you know,
you are talking to a woman??"

Ought I to be offended?
Ought I to prefer that you were the sort of man to fall in before the girl has opened her mouth to speak, has put her hand to any nearby plow, has echoed reason or love or worth of any kind?
Ought I wish that my face overwhelmed you,

knocked you over,

the first
instant
you encountered it?

(ought I imagine there aren't thousands of better faces to knock you again and again in the years ahead-- long after my.... elasticity... has lost the battle with time?)

Goodness, no.

I am as far from wishing that you had loved me on sight as I am from wishing I had loved you on sight... for I cherish those months of my indifference.

I prefer hearts that are earned,


(and I like to think

that we will make up

the time.)

Darling of May

--

Now what shall I say to my darling of May?
To my darling of March, and of June, and July?
For the months have been few
that belong, dear, to you
and a history is one thing we new ones can't buy.

But you come every night that is seemly and right
And you carry your books and a Soon in your eyes
All our months are like moments,
and moments like months
But I shudder to crash through the barrier of wise.

Oh! The man, he is patient, and my eye is plank'd
I have vision that stops at the end of my nose
I can only remember
that soon our December
will go in the way that month always goes

I will watch as the seasons
turn questions to reasons
And flowers go sleeping and dancing goes sweet
My darling of May and of soon-to-be August
will watch for tomorrow, and I'll watch his feet.

----

The Missing

--

Today I get to taste
the missing of your face
tomorrow I will know
the feel of touch and go

the circling, constant dance
supply that meets demand
the need that fills--the need
that needs to fill your hand

You see, in every tock
in every phase and moon
there is a timely way
to do this thing we do

this falling into love
this falling into yes
this falling into work
this falling into rest

today I get to want
tomorrow I can get
I have your heart--in part
Already, but not yet

It is the strangest thing
that part of joy is pain
as part of loving sun
remembers (too) the rain

I love to wait for you
to leave tomorrow wide
unscheduling my years
and eying up your side

The place I love to stand
The place I love to leave
If only--knowing it's reserved--
to come back soon and cleave

---

The Tourist

-------------------


I'm a tourist! I'm a sojourner!
I'm galavanting through your heart with the rosy eyes of unfamiliarity!
You can tell I'm not from around here;
I am in love with even the cobblestones, and I've got a camera in my fanny pack.

Show me--won't you, darling?--all of the architectural thoughts I've never seen
the memories-turned-foundations of this city that I am foreign to.

Even the language barrier is a romance: you speak only male, and misunderstanding itself only reminds me thrillingly that I am here, in a new place...what more does a tourist want than to be confounded by the culture?

I may live here, eventually, if they will give me my papers;
I'll know the streets like my own hand

Until then, let me wear my sandals and take my photos and gasp over vistas for their novelty;
let me linger in the arches and pore over histories and taste the flavors so unpronounceable to me;
It is right and timely and good that this holiday should come in its season; the politics and dangers and mortgages of buying in this city will come in their time; the romance will shift its kind and effort... what I know about this journey is only:

it is right for me to be here.

this is the place of which I have dreamed.

-------------

Death in Life's Shadow

I wish, I wish, I live for Life
How strange that death was once my heart's desire
I used to long for nature's axe
For burden (life) to fly in flood or fire

A car, just carried off a bridge
A grown intruder to my brain or breast
The skin upon my wrists is thin
The whole of me--in fact--is built for rest

The spine could snap and free me quick
As cripples lose their braces and can run
The head, the belly, back and chest
Could all have yielded me escape from snow and sun

For that is how I looked at it
The neverending living was for pain
The sin upon my hands was strong
Like sap or tar-- it does not wash with rain

And love was empty, work was vain
The bones around my heart would fracture, creak
I wracked my discontent with work
while thoughts of years on paychecks ground my teeth

But this is why the Life is strange
It's strange like beauty, mead and sex can be
These wonders touch at Truly-Life
At conquered death, at blindness turned "I See"

Child of Smoke

There are so many like her; she is a typeset, etched by the rural places, stamped in replica all over this county and a thousand others below the Belt, along the Mason-Dixon.

She's a skinny, wilty-haired girl with bird ankles that curve around the legs of her chair, like her spine and shoulders curve over the front of her desk. She has a strange shape, this trailer-born, skinny child of smoke--her curves are laid around her love handles and hung on her sagging 16-year-old chest, piling on top of cheap lowrise jeans and under "You Wish" baby T's.

Her arms are thin and unused, except for crossing anemically over her belly or contorting languidly across the desktop. Her eyes hang open, horse-like, and her mouth.

There is a singular idiocy to her phrasing when she speaks, to the little hearts that she dots her (missplaced) i's and ROTFL's with. She learned only to laugh as a child, to laugh and flirt and pout; she hangs on the words of the most worthless boy in the room, for he reminds her of her daddy. She examines her nails with her spare classtime, plans for the movies and the mall, a 20 minute drive from this town.

In a month or so, her belly will show the first signs of the next generation.

Chutes and Ladders

I've known that before, like Keats and Fanny.

That pull, like two magnets in a room,
That tilting like the planets as we sit on the same couch, though in a crowd and with plastic tea-plates and wine cups in our hands

It feels inescapable, as words of delight and instant mind-meeting spill from us like a stream.
We believe immediately--are fooled into believing--that there is no other course, that the track was laid for us and we have only come this far in order to meet in this room and fall together like a line
It is so much without effort tht we make no attempt at the work, the rung-by-rung that might have carried us upward for a little while. The ease was the illusion.

It feels inevitable, like the month of May, and always feels as swift, as much a victim as May is of June.
But it is no victim, and we have no right to cry, for we did not treat it with honesty or question it soundly, with blows around the midsection to test its hollow places.

We simply fell--into love--as if love is a chute and not a ladder.