Like a Kiss, Let Us Both Be Deeper

 

Whom is the autumn paying off

with the leaves, its scattered gold?

And what about the summer’s fruit,

where and to whom—did they go?

 

Only those who are late or reborn

would truly know and might tell

but only with a little finger’s spell

if it takes off their silence pledge

 

that locks the words behind the lips,

keeping the unseen inside their breath

as if but a little kiss softly grown on them

 

were the key and the pass, unbolting turn.

Then perhaps winter’s whitely naked blank

would let Spring in and back as a poem’s line.

O the Eyes that Wing the Souls with Verses!

He takes wing and flutters

in his urge to rise up and gaze

aloft, and that is what brings

the charge that he is mad—

Plato, Phaedrus 249d-e

 

In the flight and moment

so minuscule and brief

even an instant thought

couldn’t be thought twice

 

(that’d let it feign and fib),

eyes get sometimes caught

and tied in a sudden knot,

strong to halt and tether

 

even knees and tongues

along with the hearts—

turned to paired wings

 

with which our mad souls fly

where the coupled glaze has fanned

and found—nuggets of once lost gold.

Unto that Night from the Salt Mines of the Day

 

Some wardrobes, clothes, some dresses—

are subtle speeches, talks, or almost verses,

or songs even—by bringing home or closer

forward beauty’s fluttering & elusive points.

 

Once upon a time—on a summer night it was—

one such outfit was on a woman on a local bus,

so soft and thin that one would swear it must

have been woven into silk by entrancing moves.

 

And nothing else was let to foil its pure, finest,

eloquence—except for the marvel of the smoothly

marbled skin, fluent and swelling in fresh tenderness

 

and beats of breath and coils of breeze—and the moon

halted in the sky poured its silver glaze on the rhapsody

and rapture—through kiss and touch in that tangled web.

The Passion of a Rose

 

The hair and the dress—

that’s a night’s drapery

at its darkest churned

into flames with sparks.

 

And under her eyelids

setting down those wings

in between the airy flights,

the Evening Star is pressed,

 

growing lavish in that bath,

and from such tender grapes

she pours a potent wine—

 

on a poetically potent path—

that goes by the rose, her mouth,

where all is sipped and grasped.