You move away from me, but not all at once. That would be too easy. The slow fade feels like mercy at first. Unlike the clean break, it gets worse every passing day. It’s like moving from a house

That deluge of haze just before sundown. Spring shakes Winter’s hand goodbye. Now the day has truly gone. Street lamps glow a sodium pink When blue milk pacifies, the copper moon sliding up a sleeve of glass, her luminous

November curled itself around my spine like cigarette smoke, seeping into me. December froze in her grey web. I want to wake from the dark, sleep naked in moon-cooled dirt, deep in the night where graves spread like black

Time smooths rainbow hardness of tree basalt, vermilion jasper, silvery granite and pale feldspar with the help of humdrum but patient jeweler of tides, volcano-born, earthquake-quarried, heat-cracked, wind-carved, death shapes compact among the rocks; it drifts light as a

A doll hangs from the claw of some quarter machine that shimmers and leers at you; it chokes the cotton from brown paws in the vitrine of childish hopes of the carnage of kids and crowns or the odds

When my hollow present blows the dying embers in the heart grate, fond childish cinders glow up; the frozen black memory melts past colors, a sparkle of rainbow recollections. As I walk up on our trodden pavement I see

You take me into muted wilderness and bid me to listen to your quiet trickle— through the rooted trees I lie in a thicket and you whisper in my ear to join you. I wade into your embrace, and

And then there’s Tom who liked to boast “I think I’m a ghost…” Next week we will lift a drink and toast to Tom Who disappeared a year and a week ago. You say it’s a sin to eat