A long haired teenage troubadour was twanging
from the wilted bar a half mile down
the shore. This late, just one old bluejeaned angler
was squinting downward on the fragile waves.

And as they overturned, a ceaseless blinking
partly stolen from the glowing town,
and part their own sad folding, white on gray,
they made me sad, and love her all the more.

A love that troubled and comforted me
as wind that wandered down the little alleys,
that liked but didn’t stir the hung-up herbs,
that liked but didn’t understand the cloud

ragging all hard all night against the moon.
The clatters of dishes from the yellow houses
were sounds of home that just put home farther
away. The jasmine swelled against my brain.

When I became a wind that chased your hair,
and spent all night collecting sand to splash
against a dune, I lost you in the rhythm
of those transpiring, unconnected things.

My red head, dove, my green eyed hummingbird
above the dock, my pair of scraped bare feet,
sundress, old swan, what town is this, with salt
still in my shoes, I’ve dreamed? Have I dreamed you?

1.10

What does the rain say of the umbrella’s
drumming? That it entices the waters towards
her shielded figure, making her walk
on the leaf-plashed brick a harmony of desires.

The crow knows nothing about it.
A little of his nature stolen by
her imagination, he shoulders the rain
and flies back out of her eye again.

Edinburgh 1.23.10

my frail produce
of the winter’s pain,
you are enough, enough,

better than the whole
wet tree’s quick evening gold
at pacifying me.

1.22.10

Her mouth, so sunset dark
had eaten cherries. Carefully,
to leave the stems still
vining from the seed.

Bobbing down the stairs,
her look said they were naked
in a china bowl, tabled
sunning near the parted window.

The unforbidden pleasures
taken in an air of worship,
these she understood,
and so I knew that as well

as mine, she was the sun-dressed bride
of a still-young God, hanging
the trees, late afternoons,
with red delicacies.

1.22.10

and the boat’s flirtations
with the blue terrain
clear and fast as
a baby’s eye,

the sleep of this waterlogged
girl in a surrounded chair,
unaware she is about to
let her favorite book

slip tiredly into the sea.
All is going orange.
Her smooth legs and arms
are alight.

Above and behind her,
uneasy packs of sea flies
hover and dissolve
in winds carried in

on the breakers.
For such an evening,
for the fanning palms of
the young who wouldn’t give…

but just that longing
is perhaps the seaside’s meaning,
it’s the blue polish on
the churned stones,

the dank sweet scent of
seaweed’s death. Quiet.
Watch what the streetlight on
the cliff throbs downward to reveal:

her squeak and barely woken running,
her effortless flitting away
towards her bed with its white
window to the sailing moon.

1.10

I send this poem,
little candle-boat,
into the oceanic
waiting ear of God,

with no more freight
or supplication over this
than the mosey of ship signals
I see, the sand pepper,

the purple variance
from which the pelican
spears a dying wink
of food,

the ghost crab’s
angling smudge,
the wet shoulder of
a sand bar rising.

God, the deep green
blank of a silent face,
the watch lights kindling
in heaven’s rigging.

1.10

The sun of a false-started spring
paces the southern roofline,
southeast to southwest,
and never wanders back.

What a shipwreck of half-
intended music: my strained
breathing, his forgetful
walking, the faint pallid

warmth of a poem written
in thin sun that dreams
the warmed sand of full
summer, the loud blues playing

on the ocean-flirted dock,
the light draining
slow as honey
from its sizzling zenith.

Edinburgh, 1.18.09

I think so. But how
the veins running down
to my fingertips throb

for the telecaster pounding
of a summer rain, and
the awning under which we

smoked our sour cigarettes.
The storms of America
fall in blues, a hummed

whining the sweet blue
of a body-crammed room,
where in low light,

on tight cloths, settles
the midnight dew.
I have friends there,

I have an undrunk beer.
A river dammed and
filling my imagination.

A boat on the river,
a song from the boat, lights
dangling from the rigging.

Too long stroked by
the soft finger touch
of a lengthy education,

who born along
that river’s path
wouldn’t nurse a need

for the fishy brown
soft winded shore, the
bob of the splintered dock,

the call for another
wail of music on the hot
deck that had sailed his youth?

Edinburgh, 1.13.10

And it doesn’t fear the sunrise
of thin-pounded gold,

and it thinks nothing of disappearance
in the appearing grass.

It doesn’t smell with its coal
the change that’s like the musk

of a tree’s blood in the air.
It puts its shoulder on the ground.

It dies like a boy
falling into a hammock.

Edinburgh, 1.12.09

And why should it come to me now?
Like a picture I forgot was
hanging there. Chattanooga,
on our way to the stadium.

Colin’s blue cardigan hanging
from his elbows, the beer
smell already stale as we
meet the breeze on the concrete stairs.

A bat crack and the
absence before a
storm of cheering. All afternoon
that way, in the deep sunk

comfort of our old hometown.
My wife’s shoulder’s, almond,
leaning against the sun. How long
has the memory sat dusting?

How much of me hinges
on it, on the memory of
the feel of a summer air that is
itself forgetfulness?

Edinburgh, 1.10-11.10