Two Poems

MELANCHOLY IN DEFINITIONS

Whatever love is, it isn’t the thousand
points of grass raised over the field,
or the spot of sky each blade pins

at each stubborn angle. It isn’t the angle
between my shoulder and its blade
or between his shoulder and his blade. It is

and it isn’t a blade held against the shirt
that holds itself against his skin, his body.
There is forever an instead beyond

the place we call body. There is forever,
which is an instead made of night and its gray
way of sliding to settle the asphalt’s argument

by licking a path between the pines, and there
is forever all the time and trees and streets
between the angles of my body and the angles

of his body collapsed, small and green and sweet
as a blade of grass turned into a whistle
between his far and gentle teeth.



THAT NIGHT IN (THE CAR & THE INSIDE & OUTSIDE & SO)

If I call the trees spires they will still not be spires. Not even
if you should agree. Yes you. & anyway what need would a bird
have for pews. I thumbed a cross against each egg & watched

the mother wing away. When I was a child it was all in my hands.
My palms walled the church in & my fingers prayed & inside
there were people with heads & they bowed them. You said do I turn

here & left or right. I said yes from inside of the L my left hand made.
I never remember how to remember what’s right. The windshield
wouldn’t stop showing off its blurred trees, the sky was a window

with a set of eyes & on each & every side there was a God someone
should belong to. That was the night my hands refused gloves, choosing
the way cold touched them, how it tended to each finger, eager as any burn.