Stitching together

behind this soft eclipse
upon the polar hem
brooks in meadows run
as blind men learn the sun

wait in everlasting robes
around this quiet courtier
bliss is but bliss and breath but breath
life is but life and death but death

on this long storm a rainbow rose
horizons straggled down
has anybody found
Around it’s forehead bound

Some pale reporter from awful doors
Some sailor skirting foreign shores
The gales indeed were done
On whom the summer shone

Obsequious angels wait
Full purple is his state
Her needle would not go
It puzzled me to know
this the signal woe

whose voices trained below
and on the other side
recede the disappointed tide

Records

She pours soft refrains
She struggles in the lanes
Her soul's at liberty
two bodies therefore will be

with such a practised frost
recording how she 'lost'
the lightning that she knew
the fire that she drew

and wrapping rail by rail
she wrings a crystal veil
She did not know I saw
She ate that fellow raw

On stump and stack and stem
Recordless except for them
that night's fireflies will be
blinking when we set them free

Emily D

Myself a millionaire
with mines I little know
her glory revelations be
thought entirely for me

needless as at sacrament
that make all things new
A distance to behold the dew
upon her amber shoe

Madrid

this heart is meant to burn reality
this heart will leave gravity behind, a gift
of dreams that in their passing
billow clouds of a stronger utopia.

This heart leaves ashes to fertilize a reality with gravity that
moves at the speed of dreams.
This heart calls into being a Phoenix for
our pens that scribble rotations between
the door to the sun and
the street of the virgin of dangerous things.

Hers

The dice rolled out spilling life into her hands

A constant presence, changing temperature
His hand found one truth; gravity is overrated

Invisible clouds covered the stars
Her love was an open sky, His loathing a bridge

Splintering, soft shards of sea-soaked wood

Where the real becomes a series of moving images

That give light and love with fists full of fire

As/Like Twice a Fortnight

The secret sea has crept inside her head forever

Silk and fine cotton when we drank tea out of tiny china cups
We were warm and dry with wind and sun shining their light

The day had become a leafless, cloudy secret, hard to understand
She had so little grammar of journeys
She wrapped her secret sea in naming the planets and their distance from the sun
Her exercises yielded love, laughter and tender tears, twice a fortnight

As/Like Part of an Answer

They discussed naming the stars as

The day would gently carry them to the edge of the lake
They made bonds inside fists full of fire

Their tongues were as light as feathers

Dahlias spilling blood for the poet's pen
They stitched the quiet forest of forever into a bomb
Their very own atomic reaction

Their words rose like bubbles in lakes the color of tea

Nothing was the same now that dissolving fingertips
Reached up and out towards the sky

Beside them were glasses for seeing through the light of the sun

Resting intentional arcs
Spelling the part of an answer she was trying to remember

Sampling Sherman Alexie two

The dice rolled out of the cup like the next available table
A child in the sky with and without grace
Bodies reasonably intact like a paternity test in the soil
She held her life in her own hands as if it were a constant presence
a house guest and permanent tenant who crept around all the rooms in their shared lives...
changing their temperature
"No, no, a thousand times no," he said his hand found one truth; that gravity is overrated
the invisible clouds covered the stars
When love is to open sky as loathing is to a bridge with black water pushing against the foundations
They will have arrived

Sampling Sherman Alexi

Up is down when
even the scientist knows
that gravity is overrated

Up is down when
the invisible clouds covered the stars
in her eyes that drove the darkness

Up is down when
big mountains range as dormant volcanoes

Up is down when
I pick up all Indian hitchhikers
and bring them a little closer to home

Up is down when
I can ask someone close if
he is like the toughest indian in the world

Up is down when
Rising from earth to sky
he became a new constellation

Up is down when
I wondered if I were a warrior
In this or a previous life

Up is down when
I traveled up river toward the place where
I was born and
my heart was filled with the thin white skeletons of
one thousand salmon.

List exercise

They discussed naming the stars
They made bonds inside fists full of fire
Their tongues were as light as feathers
While their words rose like bubbles in lakes the color of tea
Beside them were glasses for seeing through the light of the sun

As/Like If I were Janet Frame two

A secret sea that has crept inside your head for ever
Where we drank tea out of tiny china cups
We were warm and dry with wind and sun
The day not to have been a leafless cloudy secret hard to understand
Though she has no grammar of journeys
Naming the planets and their distance from the sun
Love, Laughter and tender tears

haiku exercise

They made bright firelight
They wore white sea salt
They were seahorse riders

haiku exercise two

silk and fine cotton
shining their light once
then twice a fortnight

As/Like if I were Janet Frame

A foreground blazed with looming and light
Visible and in motion as if brushed by secret currents and tides
Nothing belonged to me, not even my body
I could not call my feelings my own
The sun's hair stood on end
The sky accommodating all dark and light
Black polished, brick dusted, spotted ladybirds
Pleated wings like skywide curtains parting
For the rose resisting the inhabited forest of the heart
Accomplishing it's own private moments of growth