Missing Words

I wanted to write you a letter
telling you about youself, or at least
about myself when it comes to you.
But just after I wrote, "you have a
magical way of erasing my memories,"
I found a hole in the language.
There is no noun meaning,
"a nostalgia for the heartbreaks
of the past," not even close.
So I tried to write my way
around it but then I found no word
for the memory of the skin,
which can almost put your hand
back on mine. Even my thesauras
was no help. So I gave up.
What I need to say to you, I need
a whole new language to say.
That is way I would always look
at the unfolded letter of your eyes
and say everything but what
I meant to say and why, I think,
I read a sentence in your eyes
that ended in a long, trailing elipsis.

Many Ways

I boil water on a gas stove everyday.
I've boiled it with my breath and a small
tent of burning sticks in a rock box.
I've boiled it in a microwave
and with the focused sunlight
reflected off of the crecent mirror.
I've boiled it with electricity
and with the marriage of two cold
chemicals that surge together and scald.
Every time, the pot boils and steams.
Each time, I make my tea.

Dead Bird

I feel a well-captured urge to pick him up
and pull his wings out wide, even
if the joints groan, look him
in his opaque eye and feel his death
on him like an oily patina.

He's a little black spindle fat with thread.
He's the very glyph of a dead bird.
I want to look at his belly and find
the cat's teeth marks, the scar
of a power line that breathed fire.

Held out like this in my hands, his head
slung low, he looks like a man-made symbol--
the way we always span the wings out.
But I'd bet the birds put their ghost in the claw
or the throat, and wear their wings like a shroud.

Overhead, dozens of the same bird, alive
and loud, bounce along the power lines.
I've left the dead one untouched and started
walking home. Some flap their wings in place,
some perch like Reapers, still and watchful.

Tribute

Here's to the poem I'll never read
aloud to all my friends and make
unconqurable memories of.
Here's to the poet who wrote the poem,
who'll have to settle for someone
less manicly empassioned by his work,
someone less fit to be his biggest fan.
Here's to the religion I won't convert to
after the conversation with the stranger
I'll never meet, who'd have asked me
the most important question I'd ever heard,
and given me a hint that would have
had me searching for the rest of my long,
wandering, stark, and diaphanous life.
Here's to the strange pleasure I might
have discovered in the hands of a man
and his black box full of pills I'd have kept
chasing, and chasing with money from
the freshly-cashed checks that kept me
screwed down tight to a job I hated.
Here's to however many women who would
have said yes if I'd ever asked.
Here's to the thousands of towns
I'll never move to and rent
a small house in close to downtown
where the owner of the coffeehouse I love
most knows me like a brother and has
effervescent debates with me about it all
over hot tea she won't let me pay for.
Here's to all of my son's and daughter's
whose souls will stay in the ether.
Here's to every person who does
any one of these things in my place
and to each and every thing they
might have done but left it to me.

Awakening

A few times, I've fallen asleep in the middle of the day
and woken up with the sky colored dark blue and had
no idea what time it was. I've looked at the clock:
around six, but which six and what would it mean
if it were either one? I've stood up and walked outside
with a wet sheet of sleep wadded up in my head
and stood on the porch, listening to the sounds
of sparse traffic, wind, my door closing, and four
different kinds of birds chirping blocks away.
I've stood knowing I would quickly shed this body
for the one that was late for work or up too early
and anxious to get back to sleep, but this one,
the one with nothing to do but accept existence
and sense all the things around it, would stay
here until the last possible moment passed.