At times, I miss the living as much as those who've passed cc: Chagall 2022
Tag Archive: love lost
I retrace the lines of your handwritten letters and imagine you once sitting there I see what you saw as the ink flows cursively from your heart, to your head, to your hand, to the paper, now yellow and cracked where your fingers run the length of the folded seams; it seems only yesterday or a lifetime ago a small water stain outside the margin, perhaps a drip from a teacup that day that missed your lips and fell, to be absorbed or maybe a tear I wish I'd saved the envelope that held the missive close in hand, the flap and stamp that touched your tongue, a return address where no one lives today at least no one I know cc: Chagall 2021
I’m not sure
to trust in
my ear or my heart,
impatient
to convey, to commune, to go with
the rhythm already,
shunning sidestep,
when I breathe
the wax is eloquent,
each pause
brings new delight
in asides,
innuendo
more than any tryst
captured
a lover’s imagination,
a wink in due time,
and I am merely a waif
combed in elusive fashion.
© Chagall ∞
I utter the unspeakable in order
to definitively convey that aspect of it
yet I do not suffer consequences. We are
bewildered – what to do, where to go from here.
I am nothing but eyes amid the sensation of a swing aloft
in a ceaselessly sunny sky, my shoelaces are green
but I am otherwise awash in primary color, yellow
and red are my glow amid her cooler blue.
Sky as thick or thin as I like it, in doughy gulps
or wispy cold streams. She could float upon oceans for hours
never to sink through salt water.
She’d swim away out beyond
where I’d imagined
the breakers would be.
© Chagall ∞
The ground is too far below for me
to discern my own face in the puddle
of rain immortalized. Once I was
a downpour, a constant gurgle
in the drain spout, warm and blue
water flows, banks steeply in foam
before the fall. I plead a cascade
of long dawnings where nightbirds recede
into the day’s cry, a jaunt once again
in sunlight that’s always warmer than early rays,
before the first frost when only a few turn sweeter
for the cold crystal tears that break on cheeks
as tiny pellets of snow on glass wiped clean
on dark roads, by butterflies – that’s where I’ll live,
atop canopies not in them, a soar above the crowd
a cut below, in startling light, not in shadow,
stark, evanescent, constantly re-birthed while birthing
incrementally ascending higher through skies unattained
upon velvet breaths that scour my lungs alive despite
the gasping intake of free fall. Vertigo does not blind me
nor deter me, my bead on you. You are Life, and We as One
are None.
© Chagall ∞
You
the final ray of
sun on her face
Tell me,
did she lower her eyes and
were her cheeks flushed?
© Chagall ∞
She’s a circling gull and
I am a flash among shoals.
She swoops me up and
then she releases
for I am not what she seeks.
I wash away once more to be beached
yet again on the sand down the shore
amid shells and kelp, content atop smooth
sunbaked eroded rock.
© Chagall ∞
The amaryllis she planted bloomed
when she was no longer there.
Red passionate flower unseen
follows the sun regardless.
A peacock-fan of fronds protects
the stem.
It’s a virus that striates the petals,
imbues them with streaks of pinks.
Where she kneeled to sow, the earth
holds two soft dimples still.
These well with water on rainy days
but dry quite sere in full sun.
I am overwhelmed by sight, smell
and sound, this day just like then.
I close my eyes, open my heart,
to hear and to feel her again.
© Chagall ∞
Dion singing about runaway girls,
makes me want to pull my heart
tighter around the years, they pass.
Kisses fade into scents of lilac
where lavender used to be, where
there will never be roses.
I couldn’t bear apologies from
so tender a spirit, especially
for naught, such was her challenge.
I etch the horizon precisely where neon should be,
pretending there are bridges and stars hanging
in thin city air.
I’ve imagined myself as a silhouette on rooftops
blending with balustrades and fire escapes, in shadow
descending quietly.
To find her alone on Belmont Avenue, under streetlight,
in gentle snowfall, in warm rain, wherever her life
turned inclement.
And time is like an arrow struck from the quiver
of a rosined bow, approaching its acme.
…ask any fool that she ever knew …
© Chagall ∞
I’m not coming out, but I will invite you in;
today we’re serving sliced-twice fried rainbow.
© Chagall ∞
Alphabet City 