Scared of Others

I’m the only one
at the hotel happy hour,
switch-grass re-planted
around empty benches, 
staggered along a dark swerve in the river.

Two-for-one.
You’ll never know when
it hits you until it does,
wide awake in a wide bed

in a city that everyone
says is really something,
the sky-train sky-high over
the cars, the people—

so many spots
where you
could fall
if you wanted.

Horsehair

My reading glasses ended up in the grass.

It’s easy—I’m lost without them.  Yet I

can still pick out black flies as they float

above the summer spread of poison oak.

Love gets scraped away so early, however mute it is—

the very fabric—a spider web, still wet,

strung thin between weeds.

The trailered horses exit the parking lot below the fire break,

their tails shedding, still wild.

Moments breed, take what’s left of time.

In my hand a trail of horsehair.

Fucked,

as a child.

Hearing Voices

A web, woven
before you could awaken

bright filaments
in the wind,
a spiral the heart
could never hold.

There was a day when
music escaped your mouth,

the song of
how narrow
the world is even
with us in it,

all that talk about spinning
around something that never moves,

like you were when you were little
and no one said or heard a word.
What does anyone want?
It seems more than all of us could ever handle.

Hummingbirds, smaller and more alive
than you could ever be–

in the summer trees
mock apples
fall in the dry grass

somehow still
watered when it was over.

Sunday, or Something Mapped

Gunmetal sky,
slate if that sounds right.
Chewed on all afternoon
until night came.  What if you were
an arrow, let go from someone’s bowstring,
updrafts of air as you went,
streams of wind right through you?

On most maps you could
figure out where you were heading.
At any rate, no one would ever
know if you fled that way,
across and over the
digital hills, swiftly fording
man-made rivers.

In dreams, there is always someone
who doesn’t fit the narrative,
who calls out
your name in
the coming dark,
which is always
yours.