1.
Late-life steps around multiplying tombstones
with familiar names, fading inscriptions of memory,
unrelenting formidable slabs that seal forever
once-warm breasts and thighs,
mouths that laughed you to ecstasy or terror
or were indifferent to your unfathomable desire
for one moment of attention, contrition,
one instant of union deeper than blood heat,
some intimacy of souls that would be epiphany
beyond existential absurdities
consuming our brief, diurnal lives—
late-life circles accumulating obituaries, imagining its bracketed dates.
2.
Until she turns away
from your gazing,
the backing vocalist
on the side of the stage
in the kaiso tent,
Bianca of the almond eyes,
cashier at a bakery
near the bus stand—
until she walks off
you can’t stop watching her
mouth, her plunging body repeating, repeating…
Bianca of the bespectacled almond eyes, unrequiting mystery.
3.
we meet each other
in deepest spaces:
bowels of migrant caravels
necropolis of battered cities
across fingered cyber screens
through unspeakable cravings of isolation—
we meet each other
in soft breasts of tendernesses
bypassing inevitable distances
longing past photographs of memory—
over some forest-verged river
a great blue heron slides on wide arms….
4.
The minor notes of street-smart
music, blue chords of
jazz cafés, mourning kaiso of Growling Tiger,
her open mouth as she laughs
down into your eyes,
fireflies inside night bush, signalling —
seduction or fear or unrequited caring
stammer without translation
into baffling mazes of intercourse,
impossible conjunctions—
and flailing in the filled drum of water,
to whom, and what, is the brown beautiful beetle screaming?
5.
Take wild edges
of the sly heart
infatuated like tattered banana palms
playing masquerade with the fitful air
that searches remembrances of you,
your intimate confessions
trauma of a life beyond fiction—
you are loved incomprehensibly
without compass or North Star
to plot latitudes
of turbulent need
against forbidden desire.