'if' and the unreal past

if
the snow would stop snowing
wind stop blowing

oak leaves turned brown

if
the sun did not set
in a crack of horizon

orange of another color

if the tips
of my fingers
weren't freezing

naked cold fingers clicking the camera

if the photos weren't blurry...

but how could they capture
that miraculous light
glowing then fading

winter comes early
oak leaves are stubborn

what's left of love
goes on stinging
deep into this cold night

lamentations for Jesus

yesterday the sunrise
such a color
I keep trying to go back

~~~

all these miles
did I really think
none of them would change me

~~~

how could her hands
those tiny pinkies
begin to move a sea

~~~

desert winds
arise from nowhere
take away the sky

~~~

are the years more numerous
always grinding boulders into pebbles
pebbles into sand

~~~

You've made promises
I have too
but yours aren't mine and mine aren't yours

~~~

many years are as a second
chance given to a fool

~~~

a trail leads into the forest
much overgrown
through intervening years

~~~

how long will it take
to see that life is a borrowing
I'm only a beggar

~~~

the color red should fit into this somewhere
and its dancing on waters
beneath a setting sun

~~~

weariness overtakes me
as it always does
a sudden noise wakes me

~~~

I see the diagram repeats its arcs and equations
as if this is never going to end
and there's no period represented

~~~

a single tone
sustained by repetitively drawing
a horsehair bow across a wire

~~~

A long time passes
waiting for

what keeps you alive kills you

her pock-marked face
floats up the stairwell
rising from an empty bus-stop

he's trying to destroy himself
in some far-off place
an anonymous city

lies of bought love
her small breasts
in an afternoon's mirror

a vision like pomegranates
and her neck-- a white crane
in the light of a vacating sun

she takes his un-buttoned shirt
covers her own corpse
and walks down the hall to take a piss

exodus

departing the city
leafless poplars
armless hopes
clutter

theatrics

the whole war seemed no less absurd
than that bare-chested butcher
dripping with cow blood
brandishing his cleaver
like an underpaid
b movie pirate
drunk on
rubisi

clutter

what I wanted to make of my life
just a few smooth pebbles
handful of dry lavender

a single worn limb
from a pine on a hill
where I overlooked everything

the gazelles have run off
two rusted arrows
remain in a corner

dust-covered stones
I stole from Mount Fuji
I should have left them in the sun

the observatory's purpose

professor x points his telescope
beyond impossible clouds

catalogs un-lit parsecs
with the blue glass of his robotic eye

he scans a certain number of familiar ticks
until he has the right-ascension

a few more degrees of declination
to the nebula he calls his lover's grave 

leafless poplars

i point out crows to my son
patches of yellow through gaps

rolls of dark clouds
hurled over high dunes

tell him over and over
look--

a landscape of branches emerges
surrenders its leaves to novemeber

we follow sunlight
it spills from a crevice of sky

a copper burnish
in the heights of oaks

but dusk comes
and light diminishes into leafless poplars

grey on a knoll set apart long ago
because of its color of moonlight

among the pine shadows
like a fair-skinned daughter lost to fever

armless hopes

abandoned on the road to death
because everyone else goes to much more beautiful places
because i just sit and listen to piano music
from someone else's hard times

this is a sad can of beans--
i taste blood on the lid
it takes everything with it
as if beginning to speak
in some instant that never arrives

i kill it with wanting
a whole day of giving others back messages
listening to what the machine does
when nobody's watching