These stars like your body explicit
in this space I contemplate
from the quiet orbit of my heart.

I would translate myself,
my cantilevered heart
metaphored and similed
that you might know how you wake my body,
how you wake me in the core of the sun.

Theology

What impudence!
As though Truth or God or the Way
can be captured in formulae.

The tall candle becomes the short candle.
If the candle never was,
where did the candle go?

Sometimes I yet pretend to find myself here
as though there were a purpose in meaning.

My heart a cupboard of many drawers,
fragments of self
sized and sorted and stored.

You are what I do and do not have.

But I keep to wordless words
that are either wise or safe
while I wait, while I wait.

So sweetly, so sweetly I drown--
your riptide eyes that seize me
and take me under.

A last brittle leaf
and the autumn oak
draws into itself.

Reality Explained

That stone is just a stone
but it is not a stone;
it is what it is exactly
yet it is empty

and emptiness is not what we think it to be.

Haiku from a Random Comment

for Jen, who made this poem possible

Cats are like snakes, but
for hair and legs and not lay-
-ing eggs. Then they're not.

The soft violence of your gaze
pins me to these sheets
as you mount my horizon like a sun.