I promised no more poems of that night at the Alhambra,
holding hands beneath the moon Lorca once adored,
for to dwell on love’s sleight of hand is to risk breaking
its spell. It was decades ago, in gentler times,
as the past is always more gentle, tender even, like a knot
in your back you can’t massage, so you lay on a baseball,
re-position until the seams touch your pain and you think
This is what we mean when we say it hurts so good.
Yet here I go again, re-winding the tape to see how
Copperfield made Lady Liberty disappear: each time
I learn the truth, I become young and naïve again,
disappointed to lose what was never mine to begin with.
Once, we sat outside La Estacíon de Granada from dawn
to dusk, passing notes, drawings, glances, watching trains
come and go and believing we alone could remain there forever,
the fair youth of Keats’ Grecian Urn, our bodies like two embers
falling, falling. That night I could not sleep, I stood
on the balcony of my Andalusian apartment certain this was
the end of time, and perhaps it was: trains led me away,
my cheeks wet with her tears of goodbye, oceans separated
me from myself, and somehow there I’ve remained, on a bench
in the shadow of the Alhambra, chewing on bread and honey.
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poetry
Diary
Ages ago I kept a diary in a hand legible to
none but me. I read it on my knees as just-fallen
rain clings to pinecones like wet feathers,
the evening slips into its velvet gown,
and starlight pitter-patters on my head
like drops of gallium. I am thankful
the day is dying, for I have forgotten how
to live. Who wrote those words belongs
to an empire that collapsed under its
own grandiose weight, its high priest
poetry
Enlightenment
I was seventeen when I read Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen
a couple pages at a time, putting down the book to observe
sunset drape itself over my mind, falling asleep thinking
of not thinking, hearing a flock of birds and imagining myself
flapping against the sky and recalling that I am sky. Once,
the book well-thumbed and creased and read twice over,
I felt an ant crawl the length of my arm like a nagging
sense that
poetry
Foul Weather Friend
I am a foul weather friend, dear poetry.
I have paid you no mind when spring rains
wash clean the marble statues of gods
and a cheery sun
reads aloud your sweet inscriptions,
nor when awed children skip through museums,
nor accordion-song fills the subway,
nor a stranger does another stranger
a kindness,
nor blueberries are so ripe they bleed sugar,
nor velvet chocolate cake knocks you dizzy with love,
nor, after making love, my wife’s perfume
clings