For Jim

The perennial search for pulse,
at the bonepile, in the boneyard
or when Spring fleshed green the fields
ever spread for walking—have we softened,

to leave them to grow untrodden,
tiring entirely of tiredness that we
succumbing to rest may have lost a
glow once occurred in the marrow.

No. There is no loss that does not get,
nor have we ceased our looking, or lost
at all. Our company with one another
less than our mythology of friendship

of brotherhood carried now as one would
childhood, or, later, youth and young life.
Nonetheless, you are my friend and I will
always need water from the well of that sense,

beyond circumstance, or distance, or living
in the same town without a word for months!
There are many around, Jim, but few within.
Come any Siberia, the bones remain integral.

Your music, or speech, or loves, your learning
and going away, there is situation inside you
for all there’s to do. The “grand expansion” is a
turn of the head, to see friends there, me among

in clouds or mire or the same trite continuation
of life. There is ever a color to find in the wood
that found increases the variegation of the eye.
Again, as ever, forever, do not stop the looking.

Muggy

Your eyes do not
alter,
stones over which
passes the water.

Lashes, bank-side
grasses,
comb motes from
blinks of winds.

And by your nose's
bridge,
mark of a step of a
vision that entered in,

passed through the
water,
silt on the stone,
that softens the stone.

Backgammon with Elyse

Pick up your
dice

so
I can
go

Movements / Mathematical

Though the falling,
a wandering, unplanned
as our meeting, friend,
position, gladly taken

there is only chance
for another
that did not
happen.

Your folk etiquette
bless it, and you your
deftly made mobiles
draped on a rafter of

an absurdly classic Southern
back-porch. Also your sense of
words, as fabric worn by you,
colored, and succumbing to wind.

Some hay in your backyard
tussled, loosed from the bale
and helping yourself you help
one so untrained at the game.

Swagger of your
laughter, it is not
pride but dignity
a theater of joy

asserted, softly
as cotton blooms
in your Alabama
clouds of earth.

Swim, Colleen

swim
Colleen
the water
sky to move
within Colleen
swim your lungs clean
breathe Colleen
pulling arm and arm and
waving hands finned
swim Colleen
there is enough for you
constant giving
Colleen.

swim
Colleen
Colleen
swim
Colleen
Colleen
swim
Colleen
Colleen
swim

swim

swim

swim


like you used to.

in Sharon Lake.

Makes a Bird

Wind in a holly berry
makes a bird conceal.

We'd seen one another
seeing one, an other.

First, wind moves, then
holly berry, move, Raven

old leaf shuttling in
with air still now you're here.

Wind in any company
often confuses sociality.