Yes, It’s True Not All Lovers and Mates Are Musical and Lyrical

 

Strange how gentleness is a leaning-in,
and how the action—its verb and move—
articulates three key vowels out of five:

A, E, I—

before the shock of touch
gets a chance to shape and round the mouth
into the likeness of deep-toned O or U.

And so intimacy’s summoning call
casts its wooing vows

like a brush in its initial stroke—

as if the space in between
needed to be swiped aside, undone,

so that joy and bliss of the soul may live—

with the help of lambda,
which stands—per Socrates—
for a motion gliding softly
more than any other sound.

Algebra with a Heron on the Cuyahoga River

The heron’s blended blue and gray
bespeaks a ruminant silence
as it covers and dyes
the dusk between day and night.

With its glow subdued,
that coat—a little cloud
furled in gray and blue—
alludes just as well

to the silken swells,
the tufts and wisps
of mists that moor
in dells their raveled sails.

And I cannot help but wonder
how adamant the heron is
in staking out its vertical,

and thus aligning it all—

like a painter’s clean and easy,
perfect, and thus otherworldly line,

with an ethereal, waiflike axis
running through both death and life,

since only in that way it knows
it may attain and consummate
the faultless—the arrant,
pure clarity and calm

in which alone the mind
touches the impeccable,

that lets one hear and see
what moves—even in the dark—

and where, down within,
it stirs and heaves,

even if but vaguely,
stillness and its script.

And in that faint
and paltry rift,

then the heron acts—
and brings

the netted charge and catch,
lifting it from its element
on a precise bill—

so that two

are once more one.

Like a Wand That Lifts a Bar to a Swell of Song

 

O sweet invite! Thus a partition is undone
by a welcoming palm and a longing arm,

and so too is the cover that barred the way so much,
the lingering and its dilly-dallying lull—

like that blank page sliding, by the thumb,
between the jacket and the frontispiece,

and the book’s first image-churning lines,
and love’s overture—its initial, unveiling act—

past a merely tentative, borrowed yes,
past the waiver, past the silent wait,

leaving window curtains stunned,
with eyes mended to the deepest shine.

How simply then we could come close—
and in—and across a gracious smile!

Why Does the Spring Cuyahoga Valley Feel This Year Like Speaking French to Me?

 

I did not know before
that violets, cross-stitched on the floor
to tart up the alternating April
and the mending May,
could be white as well—

and even so many to be found,

like itinerant tiny kitten paws,
scattered and spread
beside this valley trail,

amid all the purple pennons
unfurled by the season’s minute
blooming heads,
timid and modest

before all the other colors come,
bounteous and brimful
in their released blaze.

How reserved and discreet
is this printemps little print,
the premier marvel and presage
of the light surging out
and reclaiming life within!

All those bared, starlike whites—
sous la pluie pourprée et violette!
Toutes les belles blanches,
tendres et douces,
tels de petits baisers
sur la joue offerte.