Sometimes, When She's Nude

Sometimes, when she’s nude, a blue

illumination comes to visit. Although

it never comes when she is clothed,

it doesn’t seem betrothed to any prurience.

So she goes back to savoring the sheer

luxuriance of her bright orange hair,

and she forgets that she is bare. Soon

she hardly notices the blue glow’s stare.

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Your Memory of Youth

Faint yellow, like a breed of northern morning sun,

elongated and distorted and yet beautiful, your memory

of youth consorts with you as if it’s hiding in a funhouse

mirror. Its sheerer sweeter lucency comes clearer

as you near the wide and unresisting eyes. You look

into them, find them wiser than you were prepared for.

Poreless skin is bared for you, its silken tightness beckons

like a stream of consciousness too warm and odd to enter.

It is the center of a pure circumference in which you

have no place. Except within the grace of soul,

which knows it, and which knows it whole. But you are

only mortal, and you’re old. Your memory grows cold.












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He Lived Up on a Flagpole

He lived up on a flagpole.

He liked it for the view.

It lent him sweet perspective

to see and join the blue

warm sky in Spring.

Except it wasn’t Spring.

The sky was blue but cold.

Not the day, one might well

say, to be flagpoled.

But there he was

and there he’d be:

beautifully adapting

to inconstancy, thick limbs,

all serpentine and gold.

He didn’t mind the cold pole’s

sway. He’d wait for May.

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