Tomato

She is sick
She holds the tomato
that I have given her
from the garden.
She brings it to her nose
and smells it.
She rubs the brown
flecks of dust dirt
off until it shines
and hands it back to me

This Is Vaguely Somehow About the Poem

But we in our motes

(may I offer you some?)

paint the foreground

with pointed perfection

of the few glimpses

he had in Giverney

with autumn within shot

to tell us that this novel nothing

pleases the sawdust sunlight

amid the carnal comments

With Your Coffee

Do you prefer

the anticipation

of a snowball

A room with

or without a

fish tank

An Eden-like porch

with wicker

and Adirondacks

A long sleep

with the feeling of being

awake or a short one

after a day in a hot tent

in a sweatshirt

or the right book

forgetfulness

clever understandings

ice out in the universe

eavesdropping realizations

praying mantis entertainment

the dead with a suitcase of mist

or whatever you call it

three creams and two sugars

with your coffee.

Insert Idea

Glimspes of boarders

advance like suggestions

living like the lights of cars.

Now that one doesn't always remember

that something emerges for a moment

and breathes into the atmosphere

and that we

as we sit on these bleachers

begin like an undoing

the weather of a last novel

rocking on and on

half brushed by mud

half impossible like rain touching

the dome of twilight.

Is this old hat?

Insert idea.

Drinking from Dew

The truth towards the end of morning
could ask us of anything
if it asks like the trees ask
a heavy swaying
offering to renew the scent
of tomatoes
as if the sweetness was passing.

Flowers perhaps we could ask
would still gather us up some meaning
before the people begin handing them
out on every street corner of every city.

The Stone

From my balcony

each letter in the word "complexity"

drops like fine china

and in its pieces

is a new undiscovered landscape.

In book stores

under the cover of night

tiny men ready their tiny erasers

but come to find

when they open up those dictionaries

the word already dissolving.

From the tops of mountains

it lingers only briefly.

On the river swollen with spring

the word has never existed.

In other places it has turned

simply chocolate.

And in the front of houses

the word has been replaced by single stone

that only a few can lift, even fewer can carry

and only two can love.

Dancing at Five

I

Your kiss is the taste

of a broken heart

and sleeping beside you

your thick blood

pools in the wine

cellars of your legs

in the dreaming

of your bitter mouth

II

I do not want life to be bread

but a long trail of wooden bars

in the afternoon of spring

after a shower where the wood

smells fresh and wet

the people are new and the slow

twilight is indefinable like oil.

III

The husk of the butterfly

stayed watching us and gradually

the moist loneliness wounded you.

IV

My love, I cannot write anything beautiful

about the sea. Since you are not in it.

And no roof, or birth, or moon rises,

no fruit turns pink, because you have

not tasted it.

V

It is the skin around the eyes

the sleepy hinge to the eternal

rubbed soft with the premonition

of music and soaking peaches

that scents the rain,

that flours at the touch of pestle.