At Two Forty Seven AM

When I'm driving down Deer Hill
forty-three miles an hour
at two forty-seven am
& listening to Jets to Brazil,
I am thinking of you
with shoulder cut hair
blond in snow-reflected sun
with your shirt off
at the shoulder.

& when I pull into my driveway
where I don't play basketball with my brother
now & is always filled with cars,
the headlights paint a chain link fence
gray, still I think of you
skin browned in a beach sun
you spend your mornings under
with brown dyed hair
and your eggshell toes
curling beneath the sand.

Later, when I strip and lie in a bed
I call my own, I will pull the
jersey sheets over my body
& still think of you
bent over my smiling face
planting strawberry kisses
on the hairs of my beard
rustling in the smooth breeze.

Here, I will wake,
I will do so alone,
and you will not.

Hungry in the Lunch Lines

How lovely you are today, Plattsburgh,
on an Easter Sunday when
all the college kids are sleeping
or drunk or drinking still,
kept cross or quiet eyed inside.

People in high steepled buildings
have their hands pressed, closed
tree flowers in dawns new light.
They are thinking about some cross-burdened man
and the empty cave he left,
while I walk down a steep embankment
alone after a night without sleep.

Swallows in the trees
brown, white, loud
against the quiet rush of a river still thawing.
A girl I passed earlier
told me He is risen.
I said the sun always rises,
she didn't like my joke.
I didn't like hers either.

Even the sky has clouds today,
and yes, all I want is a room
with her in it, but she is on her knees
for a man I don't know, palm to palm
and head bent just
enough toward the ground.
An old heavy book held against her chest,
in her blood, opened far from me.

Bits, Pieces

In the face of oblivion,
an ostrich head buried
& mud caked,
suffocating securely
beneath the surface.

Or, the expanse of
albatross wings, few feathers
still floating in spindles
to an ocean tide
folding & swallowing the yellow beak
before a new absence.

Yes, in the face of oblivion
there are options
& they are endless:
the time between
the trigger and the recoil.

---

What slowing throng
pulses now towards infinity?
The weight of want weighs most
when want alone is wanted.
What slowing throng
to always pulse on.