Another May
Oh, the air, despite poor air quality
I love like film noir. Daily I hear lilacs
take shape against my favorite glasses,
I lift light and answer back in my own
color code. Have I told you how I dazzle
a reply to the crowd around the hummingbird
feeder? I am mostly emerald, given
the St. Patrick's business. As an Irish-
American. All that pollen in my eyes,
my voice not really throaty but strong all month
of summer when flowers are most plentiful
even when I do not know their names.
The lay-by feel of winter gone to dogma.
Squirrels I never see now having left
the Midwest. Once at Nazareth College
I ventured to the orchard to practice
Clytemnestra's call on command of
a professor I loved. I walked with
a woman who kept squinting at the raw edge
of glass on a smashed wine bottle she held.
She told me the fallen apples reminded
her of heaven she felt ready to find.
I said something I don’t know what. I thought
she should not talk of this. I took her arm
because she was weaving. The air around us
wanted to be dark. I, too, wanted to lie
among the softened apples on the ground,
only for a while but not depart.
To Love You
To love you enduringly endearingly
remains the point. The point of focusing:
to sing you to sleep then wake with you.
Wake that we might later go to sleep again,
our backs touching as if the same body.
Being the same being past the thought.
I ought to relate to the immodest
hazel of your eyes. Surmise what they might mean
when you lean into me with your soft speech.
Loving the daylights out of surmise.
The serenity of surprise embedded
in routine. The bend of the branch that taps
our window. The disappearing tuft of cloud
before the threadbare night might gentle in.
After/Thought Literary 