What we know

Seek isn’t important

As the act of knowing and seeing

Walking with you along the East River

Searching for the bridge to the crystal city

Holding hands in soft, warm air

Talking, and nothing

What I say

Think isn’t important

As the act of living outside of me

Sitting next to you in the taxi

Holding your hand in soft, warm air

Talking, nothing

On the riverbank of the Hudson River

I fell back and looked beyond

Far, deep into the cosmos and as I am here

I was there

Far out and so close

To you

Sometimes there will be no ride back

To what we see and know

The act of seeing and knowing

Is nothing

Like the dark end of my sight

Looking down the road and wondering

Where it leads

Under the street lights on 6^th Avenue

I fell back into my lush world

Far, deep into the cosmos and as I am here

I was there

Far out and so close

To you

A summertime day long and bright

Bristles bent in the west wind

To a poet’s word

I fell upon your moist cool grass

Curling with the raven

My bed sheets your shade

My pillow your roots

This spare earth

Stirs a trembling verse

Worse than you disassembled

My cold, dead love

It will be another day

Perhaps one with a raindrop or two

When this earth is ready

To call our name again

Children dream in their strollers over sand crystals 

People in day and night and far away

Dangerously play with nostalgia until it rubs away

Numb and creepy 

We stalk the water’s edge for gentler things

Here pacts are broken and the evidence stoked

In fire and fiery spark then to rise and chip against the horizon

A blaze no one would notice

Like when I was there in line for Jack in the Box

Standing evermore comfortable and quite happy with my clunky soul

I didn’t know you longed for something else on the hood of your ‘68

And your sojourn went unnoticed

It was the year I studied what loving means to me

Feting and fantasizing about every girl I craved 

When the carburetor died on the grapevine the last time Dad saved me

When I left everything I was given and it left me

You became not about anything written in the dark Conejo sky those many nights

But a visitor without a name  

Reformed into a hazy mist of your own unhappy smog

Tipping over backward

Only temptation will make you fiercely wanting

To live above your cul-de-sac away from the lights of safety and fear

Where we took my truck over the hill and landed

Down there somewhere