Captured Class

What a difference a definition can make

What a cake, what a day, what a beautiful bride

Picture don’t last forever and memories are always being refigured

And so the light falls on the walkway just so

And so falls an entire way of life on a particular day

Or maybe it’s a million airborne interlopers.

No room for parachutes here and no room for prayer.

Nothing for rent, nothing to borrow, and still, sea-levels rising everywhere.

What to order when one is facing down the end?

Not to fear, the world doesn’t end, they say,

But we certainly do.

And again the backup singers queuing for auditions.

And look at all of Nashville holding its breath.

If we can’t finally slip these strings, all is lost.

When the Weather Was

When the moon mists, let’s say

Or when you’re steering into the groove of a hard turn

And there are stiller truths waiting for you.

What is bad? What must rise?

I fall asleep before the visitors arrive

Again and again I’m myself all over again.

How would you have it? Whole-hearted but also quick

All the days in a pile, all the nights on a string.

It’s the sea that begets mist, begets fog, begets centuries-old sentinels.

And you, laughing in the face of any silence.

But you’re saving the best jokes for Permanence

Because all our lives are braided into the End of the World.

Every decision made as the plates shift beneath our feet

And spaces already impossibly far to cross are only getting farther.

What Address Is

Is there still life to be lived in six?

The problem in what goes back goes forth

As empty clubs lead us to lonely singers.

Italian would surely drift in at this point

If not earlier, if not the time of day

When the sun is slanting and the canals are aging

If not the weight of this life or its habits

Or the asymmetrical beneath all these symptoms.

It is the Great Uneven that brings me here

Again and again brings me to you

Leaving equations and details and derivative behind

Because before every road there was a path and before every path there was dust.

You have boots and I have boots, and we have the sun.

We’ll keep making sense just long enough. 

So Very Sonnet

A collection of birds

Keen on adventure

Imperfect mornings, clouds, considerations

Impossible motes in very real eyes

It’s something magnetic this Sunday

Peacetime artillery would require peace

But there is cake and ice cream this time

The sun’s daily retreat, no less fantastic

Carving patterns and byways and that which will be

Let more air in

Welcome restraint

Admit resting, admit error, admit joy

Skywriting my passwords over the crowded beaches of crowded seaside towns

While we huddle around the last fire on earth and make funny faces