for Ne----

i tread tonight's quiet waters
and hope your sails have taken you to warmer shores
so i can be
the only one whose visits keep these lost places afloat

fumble

there are little moments
scattered throughout my day
throughout my life
that seem so full with memory
that i feel i could almost
reach out
and touch

and i rush to capture the moments
on the only canvasses i know
and i get as far as "i..."
before i fall
apart

dryad (for Ne----)

There is a wild and delicate tree
near the center of my garden.
It does not grow.

All the long nights of this age
(this age knows more nights than days)
I wander the counties of the places of dream.
I gather the philosophies of monsters and the names of stars.
I gather bits of song and verse, snatched from alien tongues.
I gather fairy tales too wonderful and terrifying for waking remembrance.

I bring them back to my garden.
I lay the wonders I have found at the base of the tree.
I put my lips to the root,
and whisper something like a faithless prayer.

"Ask greatness of me, and greatness I deliver.
Assume failure from me, and failure you will find.
The whole of the hope and the fate of my being
is cast from the light in your eyes."

On rare occasion, I look up
to find her hidden in the branches,
listening.

But dryads do not answer prayers.

way-station (for Gr---)

as sun-arrows driven into the leathern skin of the great cold world
your summer laughter to the glaciated surface of me
like folded glass blown from the distant thunder of half-remembered joy
the pulsars shining out at the corners of your dancing eyes
and the soundless unsmiling wasteland of me is struck blind and for a fool
by the imagined remembering of innocences
and by passions never to be known
never to be rendered better than the baldest of lies
never to know the terrified perfection of instant's realization
of worlds touching at the lips
of gazes intersecting not as those of friends
but as those of two road-wearied travelers only incidentally reposed at this
the same way-station
a thousand years into the bad country
over the border separating what is real from what is right

consistency (for Gr---)

Every day is a quiet apocalypse
in the hollows of another heart.

We cross paths beneath the trees --
your smile, brief, thrills me.

I remember.
You forget.

Neither is today your apocalypse,
nor an interruption in mine.