Desire As Translation

Do you remember the language?

A sweet speaking in tongues,

Ancient talk in its boldest version,

Grown from the place where the tendrils you love

Fold and unfold in their persistent delicate touch,

Grown in the old garden that is such a mess of time

And rendition that your temper threatens to shovel it under.

But you don’t. Instead you study the earth. You listen.

Their language is muffled and you are barely part of it.

Desire as translation: Who is pronouncing your name,

Pronouncing what will never be your name? You are both

Alive and dead to the interpretation. Your heart floods.

Bottom is what you want and what you will never touch.

So you drift, handing over your own nimble, tough story of need.

Origins and Destinations

South and east

The early morning fog

Is disassembling

From lime and fly ash

Into some kind of ruby glaze

And the sky starts to open

In the middle of free flow speed

Merging and diverging

Jacking and cribbing

We drivers are in service

Our hands are dry and fixed

Upon the wheel

When somebody’s tires

Throw spray against windshield

I turn down the radio

And beg inwardly again

For some way to love this time

That is and is not mine

I ask the landscape

But the trees refuse

Cross hatched, unconcerned

Quietly brooding

The guardrails stay masked

Corrugation after corrugation

Seam after seam

The median strip unfolds

In long stretches of green

Ragged eavesdropping edges

Clinging to markers and eroding

When I wish for whispers

The bow pit hurries off some dirty

Songs not for my ears

They sing their intentions

For a specific date

At a specific location

You are off to work

Or what you call work

Not for you, not for you

We sing the song that is not for you

They will not excite

With unwanted sounds

They will not give way

To simultaneous demands

And though their song is dimly heard

I know they will carry on

Their hard tune

Beneath our shiny dark medium

Reminding me

                We are wearing away

                                Wearing away

Everything but the road.

My heart ached for devotion 

And she brought tulips