Sample Poems from Light in Dark Objects
The Moon
The Moon , the moon,
her bone song is
on the edge of hearing.
Bats can hear it,
and voles, raccoons,
a soft whirring, calling
her creatures
into the room of milk.
She throws her sheets over
the old furniture of my life
and I want to awaken
as one of her own:
a moth whose pale green
shimmers with the borrowed device of owls—
and sees;
a barred or great horned owl
whose shadow is the dark eye of moonsnow drifting
soundlessly over the beach,
acute to the gorgeous music
of the tiny hearts.
The leaves turn over their hands
and are washed and
washed and
cannot imagine an end
to this caressing.
I go on
living, burning
in the long milky flame.
In the moon’s tongue
the word for end or
empty is new.
Letter, 21 May
………………………………………….(for Charlene)
Hello Miracle, Sundazzle, Hunger,
this letter is following you to Florida
because it wants to overtake you.
I am Aztec with love for you, and
laugh to learn that I am only food.
I will feed you forever.
Here the surf is tearing at the beach
with its myriad animal mouths,
it shines like metal.
There the water is shining with your breath.
I miss your mouth tasting me,
I miss the way you move,
I miss the sky-blaze of your eyes,
the fine chaos we make
finding shared rhythms,
a little mako glide here, maybe wolf lope there,
the hyena of our laughter, or the snowy owl
of silent wings, cobra of
looking…. If we could live on words
I would never stop, the paper
banners unfurling
their New Years Eve, the detour of my life
bringing me to Memory Hall,
where the candles emptied little gates in the darkness.
I had married someone with a passion for need,
someone who feared the facts, and found
something else instead, I had married the fishes
swimming against themselves, and
then stepped out of the river.
And there you were, you
who were becoming someone else
with the poise of the dazzle of loss,
sliding away from who you had been,
from who you would have been,
and kissed me on the mouth,
and now hunger is everything
and I fast for you.