5.

and you
were that first hard rain in February

an errant spring
come for the second time this season

I both knew and didn’t expect
your dripping shadow on my door

I knew and didn’t know
you’d leave again
before the overeager grass
had time to freeze

4.

Santa Anas
make themselves a road
through Orange County

when they rattle through the palms
fill your sinuses with dust and oak tree pollen
then you know
summer will die
for a little while

and you can put on boots and light a fire

pretend that winter is something more
than a circuit slut

3.

Disney opens to us again
those gilded floodgates

tourist camera shutters
click
the cotton candy stink of happiness
of gluttony

we are swallowed in the excesses

mouse ears flat
on our sweaty skulls

can’t remember
why we ever came

2.

When our feet push off the wall we fly a little way into the water, a slow drift into a stillness of chlorine and sun. I might live like this, weightless with you, if not for the subtlety of cold that stalks its way into my skin by increments of time and saturation.

We could live here on this raft, you see, if plastic sharks could swim, or if the bleach were turned to salt and churning beds of kelp and stone.

1.

I could sink into you
in the longer night, in the slide
of ice into the pool

fall like glass
to concrete

The molten hands of Molech eat
fat oxen, small children

drums so thick
the fathers miss the screams

but abi says to fear the Name
who carves away the heart of stone
writes love and law
on beating, burning flesh.

jackals and crows were blind to you

while you bled warm from the pen

their eyes were made for carrion
for the ineloquence of bone
and silver coins

Winter spreads the hem of her veil across the mountain;
she has dressed herself in white
and waits for you.

Tell her gently
to come down
for one last dance.

Nu Jiang climbs higher.
All our books and mats ride on our backs
up mud and mountain roads
another day
another step by step parade away from anger
and the following rush of cities
dams and bullets
dull machetes.

We are spread too thin
along the precipice;
we are shallow and hemmed in
by those who hate.

Nu Jiang knows the Karen
and the current of indifference.
Nu Jiang knows the meaning of disruption.

Now the firs stand naked in the back woods;
all along the path they lift new tips to sun
as if to say the heavy coats of snow
were only fog and memory, or worse, imagination.

Indian paintbrush breaks red from the soil.
The lake is blue again.
My feet keep taking me to the fallen aspen
where you swore love by the color of clouds.

I waited for the last of it to thaw— that icy mound
north side of the house. I looked for signs:
a print of your boot, the shovel you cracked in a fit.
Nothing. Every thought of you has melted.

he opened for me
     sand cliffs
     waves that beat a spell of wakefulness
gave me an unsoiled name

he filled my hands with pearls
black, cold
wrung empty of their stories

took only in return
the last thread of a shawl my amah knitted,
two small tiles of blue
from the ashes of my home,
and every cloudless night I ever knew

I want the things you say
to mark themselves on the wall
as if they burned air the same red
that singes my tongue
when I repeat their granite syllables.

Someone ought to remember
how you carved the stillness thin
how you raked your fingers through
the flats of sand.

Some new owner will fill up our empty pots
will rake the corn husks from the rows
of loam and soil
and feed the starving goldfish in the pond.

And when the wind
rings through the chimes you hung
beside the porch swing,
he’ll smile and think how peacefully we lived

because the doors don’t keep
the marks you leave when you rain through

because the glass won’t shatter
like it should.

there was a song on a windowsill
started high and larkish

the notes were lost on south winds

some remember
a yellow headed child
given to lies about moon fairies

fewer knew the rounding hips
that took to swaying down the docks
heavy with truth and sand