The Word Love
Rolls softly to a climb from our mouths. Then, we pick our clothing from the floor of our hotel room, and we hurry homeward from our one night stand, as haze smolders at our burning headlights. I sense how she wanted to fuck me and not love me, and sense the word love my own jagged rooftops of a city in a dream. I have become a traveler from woman to woman, my flesh becoming a runny sore. Weary of the nightclub district I wander the outskirts of town for the one I have not found; among the scents of beans and chilis, voices from porch screen doors, among the men who wear heavy working clothes she hurries along on her business. I snip a flower that has grown on a fence and walk along garage and grocery store fronts, pass Martina’s cafe where a glass and plate and magazine have been left on the table and I wonder if it might have been her that I search for. Every sign I take to mean she has been here and left, as if a voice played on small things, or extended round buildings her animal purr, silenced at my approach and again stirs at my leaving, as if my steps were those of a jaguar and she a female jaguar. She gives light and burns off emotion wherever I go, half her turns known while another half is an unknown secret in the night. This flowing ache of love in me. Say my pain is like a watercolor of sands, tides and a lone bird unfolding its wings in a great empty space. Say on sands she has come, covering her footsteps never to return. She sits, arms hugging her folded knees on the deserted beach. Say the deep breath of waves explain the pain of living without her, and recede having lost another shell, waves dying over pebbles of my words, and for a second illuminate my existence in the flicker of light on the stones she gazes on. So close, and yet we do not find each other.
There Is No Message
There is no message in those bottles you drain, nor pity, with your head in hands as you weep at the kitchen table. And it does no good to scream into the telephone. No one can take sides for no one has abandoned you but your own childhood dream of love that has been torn from you. From that wound will come millions of evenings bringing no one but the ocean of your own silence, and drowning, arms out, you’ll call for someone, Until something changes in you, and your love becomes an out doors holler between two palms, that builds upon itself off the vast loneliness an expanse between you and other people, and like mountainous music one day you will speak to someone tuned as you have been tuned, and in both your voices will sing of two lost on separate cliffs, an eagle and its nest.
Woman, I Give Myself To You
I have unloosened the knot holding me to my end and now fall to the rough body and ruins of a new beginning. To the world I am a guest visiting a house and leave behind my name that they may study it like the fossil of a footstep of something dead. I rise, shattering the meaning, and walk out to the other side of myself, to the darkness, to the me others do not know. You must be ready for a long walk, for I take you with me. You will walk the crooked path I am and learn who I am like a barefooted traveler in the dark learns the rocks on a road. To reach the other side of me you will pass the blinding bottoms of dreams. Though I do not know the way in the dark, come with me down the dark hill of myself. You will know me in this life like a window of a neighbor in the night one uses as a marker when traveling in the dark, when you have stayed out too late and find yourself all alone, I will be there.
