There is No Escape Velocity

Your face 
has gravity.
I burned 
like a meteor
and cracked 
to atoms 
on impact. 
Now, there's
little to hint 
I existed.
Just one 
tiny scar 
that only shows
when your face
forgets itself.

I and Thou and Galaxies

Things aren't what we thought
they were. Again. Experts now say 
galactic distances accelerate.
They don't relax. This means 
there's more than one universe. 
Hell if I understand. I just sit here 
on a Sunday morning drinking coffee 
and missing you. Of course there's 
more than one universe. You and I 
made one. Until we got so hungry 
for each other's light we fled each other faster.

Fuck Mary Oliver's Poem 'The Journey'

Days like today,
after seeing you 
after not seeing you 
so long and the way 
you tasted still 
a pastille
on my tongue,
I don't want to save
my own life. 
I am tired
and I want someone
to save it for me.
You, goddammit.

Note Left on the Box of Your Things

I've removed your texts

from my phone. Remember

the one about "textual healing"?

Ha. I've deleted the pictures:

us in the funny glasses, you

windblown on the ferry, me

at the end of a long run.

We are unfriends, unfavorites.

I threw away the travel mug,

the one that said "Let's Merry."

Gone, too, the flirty postcard

you sent from Lahaina, warming

my fridge since Christmas.

Delete, delete, delete, delete.

Everything's here: toothbrush,

slacks, the jacket you wore

to the symphony, the T-shirts

you took off, the espresso maker.

So much has been removed

I'm not sure who this note is for.

There must be some connection

I can't see I can't delete.

Cafe Racer

So many ways we pray. Someone taped pictures
to the coffee-shop window. Of Drew singing.
There's a note from a girlfriend. And notes 
from strangers. The glasses of red wine 
on the sidewalk are still half-full. Tea lights 
gather drizzle this morning, two days after. 
A woman drives up and leaves a bouquet 
for five people I didn't know I loved.
Till now.

Pick Up the Thread

Children, pick up the end

of the golden thread.

It begins anywhere --

a church, these plums,

a drop of blood, the rain

-- and leads on through

the universe out to the

other end of yourself.

If you lose the thread

for a time in the dark,

keep looking: You'll find

it again. You can always

start here.

Stories Out West

I heard that out west you can spot poems ambling about off the highways like antelope.


-- John Balaban


Northwest of Yellowstone
where men can tell stories for a living,
where a speeding ticket costs you ten dollars
and littering half that,
the buffalo and antelope 
dot the sweeping hillsides like poems.


A friend and I Jeep-Cherokeed
the ninety miles from Bozeman
to a Helena rec-center auditorium
where the granolas were selling
"Wilderness: Yes!" bumper stickers
and nodding in groups over coffee,
and scuffing the floor with the toes
of their Vibram-soled boots.
We paid our two bucks
and waited for the show.


Walkin' Jim Stolz has hiked from 
the Grand Canyon back home
to Lone Mountain, Montana,
and he straps his guitar upside down
onto the outside of his backpack.
It saved his life once,
digging like an ice axe 
into the steep snowfield
he was sliding down.
He repaired it with duct tape
and uses it still to growl
out his wilderness songs.


Raphael Christy tells the stories
of Charles M. Russell
in a one-man show. In one,
an old rancher, in the process
of lighting a fresh-rolled cigarette,
spooked his horse right off a cliff.
When his buddies rode to the edge,
they found him in a treetop,
still on the horse, asking,
"Any you boys got a match?
The one I struck blowed out." 


We had beers with them later,
in the Wind Bag Saloon, 
swapping stories as the wind blew
in the West Montana night.