I

 

SEA OF LANTERNS

between your touch

and my cry

 

 

between the sea

and the dream of the sea

 

 

part her darkness with your tongue

still she remains hidden

silk drenched against skin

brine and oil    the sea on platters

tables crowded    glasses and bottles

a life    your own    left behind

a note in a hotel room

damp small of her back

rope of hair dripping

rain that tastes of an answer

 

 

the port draws us

across the folding dusk

gold against dark wool

a grasp of loosened hair

between the lit room

and the dark lagoon

 

 

trailing regret each step

tangled we come    even those

who can’t move at all

those who have earned the right to speak

in absolutes

those who have nothing

to eat our fill at the empty table

 

 

each word a chemistry binding us

to particular endless

longings    we take now as our own

the tormenting literature that names forever

those moments between clothing and skin

all and

all you live without

the place you cannot touch

yourself

the place between love

and the dream of love

fruit misshapen with sweetness and rot

the morbid mortal beauty

of this sonnet or that

words that taste of an answer

 

 

velvet lampshade    gold fringe

waterstained wallpaper    burgundy

bedcover    a room so small

every movement means touching

felled by the rain,

we woke and thought it was night

 

 

words brought down

by blows, struck

to the depth

of flesh, of

haunting and naming

the first words uttered

from that silence

the silence where love emerges

sung by a ghost

 

 

who taught me my life was not my own

who taught me to take nothing

 

 

hurtling through the narrow pass

suspended along the cliff’s edge

a violent lurch, a wrenching

each choice obliterating another

 

 

to say the wrong thing

from exhaustion, to suffer for days

something forgotten

saturated with love

aching to make perfect

 

 

first lights of land

smear of lanterns in the fog

crates scraped against stones,

carried and dropped    laughter and

blame in reply    the endless ballad

of waves against embankment

entering centuries,

you lay on the palace floor

and looked up    watching clouds open

the only sunlight that mid-winter day

in that painted ceiling

 

 

that first night I dreamed of a forest

I will never again wake with such peace

green darkness    rain stitching roots

through earth

winter sweetness

of the barn, cold as underground

and what was bare and still

was full of movement    snow darkened

with stars    how much that hope

hurt and yet

purple dusk, yellow winter sky

 

 

we arrive again    an innumerable

entering    as if from another life

saved by a moment

standing in a doorway    inconsolable

error avoided in an instant

everything spent and slipping through

as if at last    we had it right, as if

unharmed

as if we had, as if we had not,

the light fell

 

 

what one age settles, another

shakes again, sediment

in the blood    what the nape

remembers, pushed to the ground,

or the eyes, or the vitals

sweating awake, snowy morning,

black trees. the body leaps to be rid of itself,

or takes what it needs. the body

turns to its own explanation    knowing

“I cannot live without you” and

“this too shall pass”    

the lump in the throat

moving with each swallow

 

 

draw deep the oar    into that blackness

nothing heavier than    hewing the abyss

to stay afloat

the entire weight of the sea

pulled by a narrow blade

and no matter how deep the turning,

the scratch and salt of the stars remain

 

 

lanterns empty their light

into the water

where they are not

extinguished

each lamp sets fire to the sea,

igniting where it drowns