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Our matchbox bedroom in the loft above your sculpture factory Turns magical at times Behind its dark blue Druid door.   Last night, Inside you, sweetheart, It felt as if I were coming from the soul itself. And that Indian Summer Sunday afternoon a year ago When the bed became a meadow Of purple thistles, the honey hidden at the bottom of the stem Farm kids know to find For the sweetest suck of all. And sometimes in the winter when the room turns into a Cornell box Filled with the everyday miracles— Soap bubble pipe and thimble, wooden rabbits And old tan magazine illustrations of the Zodiac. Or turns into an igloo in which the only place to go Is to burrow here below the yellow blanket and the pillows To the South Pacific Of ourselves.   And then those mornings on vacation Gentle as the feathers of a light spring rain, and at the same time hard, like the beak Of a hawk.   You are where I belong.

Cherry plums suck a week’s soak, overnight they explode into the scenery of before your touch. The curtains open on the end of our past. Pink trumpets on the vines bare to the hummingbirds. Butterflies unclasp from the purse of their couplings, they light and open on the doubled hands of eucalyptus fronds. They sip from the pistils for seven generations that bear them through another tongue as the first year of our punishing mathematic begins clicking the calendar forward. They land like seasoned rocks on the decks of the cliffs. They take another turn on the spiral of life where the blossoms blush & pale in a day of dirty dawn where the ghost of you webs your limbs through branches of cherry plum. Rare bird, extinct color, you stay in my dreams in x-ray. In rerun, the bone of you stripping sweethearts folds and layers the shedding petals of my grief into a decayed holo- gram—my for ever empty art.

Too high, too high to pluck My heart shall swing. A fruit no bee shall suck, No wasp shall sting. If on some night of cold It falls to ground In apple-leaves of gold I’ll wrap it round. And I shall seal it up With spice and salt, In a carven silver cup, In a deep vault. Before my eyes are blind And my lips mute, I must eat core and rind Of that same fruit. Before my heart is dust At the end of all, Eat it I must, I must Were it bitter gall. But I shall keep it sweet By some strange art; Wild honey I shall eat When I eat my heart. O honey cool and chaste As clover’s breath! Sweet Heaven I shall taste Before my death.

The hunter to the husbandman Pays tribute since our love began, And to love-loyalty dedicates The phantom kills he meditates. Let me embrace, embracing you, Beauty of other shape and hue, Odd glinting graces of which none Shone more than candle to your sun; Your well-kissed hand was beckoning me In unfamiliar imagery. Smile your forgiveness: each bright ghost Dives in love’s glory and is lost Yielding your comprehensive pride A homage, even to suicide.

Four lanes over, a plump helium heart— slipped, maybe, from some kid's wrist or a rushed lover's empty front seat through a half-cracked car window— rises like a shiny purple cloudlet toward today's gray mess of clouds, trailing its gold ribbon like lightning that will never strike anything or anyone here on the forsaken ground, its bold LOVE increasingly illegible as it ascends over the frozen oaks, riding swift currents toward the horizon, a swollen word wobbling out of sight.

Custom, whose laws we all allow, And bow before his shrine, Has so ordained, my friend, that you Are now my Valentine. Ah, could my humble Muse aspire To catch the flame divine! These are the gifts that I’d require For thee, my Valentine! May virtue o’er thy steps preside And in thy conduct shine; May truth and wisdom ever guide And guard my Valentine. May piety, seraphic maid, Her influence divine Shed on thy head, and ever lead, And bless my Valentine. Life’s dangerous paths safe may’st thou tread, Shielded by Grace divine; And when these artless lines are read, Think on my Valentine!

Valentine, valentine you arrive in a town car with a chauffered envelope, scattered pieces of you enrolled in schoolyards like a recess of paper vanity, litter, old with red-rimmed "loves," red-rhymed lies in lace. The verses come, rising as easily as long-stemmed snakes in bloom where swamps settle down and drowse by dawn, a night of secrets slid out of drawers like knives nesting, a choice of chimes and slums overrun by bejeweled heartbreakers. What a lovely winter, almost skipping February.

I am a girl who sees the world in everything. I wonder in a 100 years if the world will just flip. I upload the roar of children, chop cauliflower because I want to see the ones I love as loving me forever. I see colorful daisies as the children of lawns swaying unfruitfully in the wind. I want the ones who pretend they are without wings to protect me touch sun, feel hearts— in that instant I understand almost everything Pretending I am flying over the worry and loss of this city into the warm sun, to touch who l can. I worry, making canapés over the sink, that nothing will be easy, ever if all of this is happening for reasons, that that family is my family, crying out in pain, thin daisies bent flat in a summer wind. I understand that almost, when they cry why nothing is easy in this world with its reasons. I pretend I am without wings to protect me— I dream one day of a city that’s at peace. I see something good that is in everyone. In a 100 years I wonder will the world just flip.

Sad. And it comes tomorrow. Again, gray, the streaks of work shredding the stone of the pavement, dissolving with the idea of singular endeavor.  Herds, the herds of suffering intelligences bunched, and out of hearing. Though the day come to us in waves, sun, air, the beat of the clock. Though I stare at the radical world, wishing it would stand still. Tell me, and I gain at the telling. Of the lie, and the waking against the heavy breathing of new light, dawn, shattering the naive cluck of feeling. What is tomorrow that it cannot come today?

Our grand peregrinations through these temporary cities, These pale window box poppies of the laughing class, Drifting as if time came in the same long dollops as starlight, Resemble an epic journey as a coffee bean resembles a llama’s foot, Though the kitchen table may be far from the desert It’s near in spirit, a yellow oasis before the wind Starts its restless sweeping of white flower-dust across the lintel, Marking the fine edge of things like children asleep At the opera, piled up near the door, summer passing On its way out. Prince Valiant vowed to sew the horizons Into a single idea, to put on the blue dress of distance, Looping past rivers and mountains as one leaps from bed To bed to make loneliness lonely, the suburbs were for him A relief, a pageant of calm desire where he settled, All the king’s horses grazing on forsythia out back While the evening tilts back out of the night, a kindly drunk Uncle, and asks you to stay. Was this the end of traveling? Or just a change in the story over time, as for example how Tous les chevaux du roi become Josie and the Pussycats From one version to the next? So all heroes are deranged By something quite common yet unexpected, a constellation Redrawn and named again through the stars Above the porch don’t shift but seem to sink Through winter’s pitcher of noircotic ink, Leaving a single streetlight that burned happily, Thinking it was the sun, after all it was the day Of the night and turned the world around it, We were good sentences and forgot where we started.