My legs weigh five hundred pounds apiece and my body at least a ton -- and to heave my feet forward wearies my lifeless and sluggish mind It always surprises me how your smile can lift me so that my thoughts yearn upward and my toes reach down to dance lightly on the ground-- 1991
She has stilled my preoccupied hands and calmed my darting gaze She has bereft me of my facetiousness to leave me bathing unprotected in the glow of her affection She has pacified my wandering wit and wiped the accustomed smirk from my face leaving nothing in my eyes but a blunt and direct artlessness in which she somehow finds me at my most appealing She has shown me a new man, small, wide-eyed, and uncertain, whom I have not yet come to know-- 1991
Other nights I have dismissed the darkness, forgetting in sleep the all-but-empty sky Call me an eager acolyte of the rational tradition -- I thought magic a wispy phantom, conjured in insufficient dreams I should have known -- I saw shooting stars the last three nights, burning brilliantly out of nowhere against an idle background, just when I had finally concluded that I knew every constellation, when I had weighed the sky and found it wanting Between my lips, your kiss lingering there, I still feel the magic that shakes the very stars from the heavens I am too wise to hope too much yet I am happy to find that I am smiling, out of nowhere-- 1991
thing about turning fifty she said eyes full on me and ablaze a smile pulling at the corner of her mouth the sense of life not over, but well through -- time to pay attention-- 2019
Her words and my thoughts
are walking in parallel
It turns out I have she says
a complex and
inner life her eyes are oceans of grey
which not everyone gets with continents of brown
... if there is a world in there
that and I am starting to smile
makes as I start to try
any to count
sense? all the ways to say yes
-- 2019
Its exterior is charming and rich with history and yes you would turn your head to look twice on your way past but unless you stepped inside you would never know its every floor wall and ceiling rococo and resplendent with patient attention to detail your neck craning up and up as the words "just ... wow" pass your lips She is telling me about her city and finding her place in college and the never-quite-fitting of high school and the irreplaceable freedom of being eleven and the tangled forked reconnecting trodden paths that lead to this particular square of tile Our fingertips touch and our eyes meet with a sparkle of recognition as we begin to open one book from one shelf-- 2019