ARRIVING, BUT NOT ALWAYS

In considering the suns kiss
on horizons lips,
the porch leaning
on mornings shoulder, the usual arrives
to hang round
doing very little.

Here comes the trees
and hills,
moving out of my time
into the plains.

**

Sirens howl at moons of streetlamps.
Each night closer, ignoring
the scraps of conscience
I throw to them.

**

I always mean to say
what then takes years
to write.
Last time
at your party
someone burst
all my speech balloons
before I could decorate
the moment.

**

There is a door
and a door and a door
painted in grandmas green.
In neat handkerchief gardens
they are called in for tea.
Can I enter
with grubby hands
and scabby knees?

---

CREED

I believe:
        That sirens cause accidents.

        That poetry and masturbation
        have one thing in common.

        The world revolves around
        a space that you create.

        In the father who loved
        everybody else.

        In the sons of other fathers
        who will kneel before
        my perfect daughters.

        In the holy ghost of memory.

        That speech is a subtraction.

        That silence is a meaning
        destroyed by its own existence.

        That we are the fingers
        by which life
        feels itself.

        That we are the sum total
        of our own ignorance;
        gods in our own right.

        That believing is never enough.

---

THE CROSSING

Our car tips westward
where the flow is changed.
A new angle where trees
no longer supplicate the air,
where rain pencils in the spaces
between leaning towers of light.

Behind is the arid place,
our dry silence;
rain pocking the dust.
Now lakes, the spelling of love
with fingers on her skin
and so many names for green.