Sketches

Woman
salt of the earth
arrogant green of
a tropical forest.
My Amazon.
In you I see
the thin line
between all that I have
and all that I have lost.

Let me live by counting
the goose-bumps on your skin
the pulse of your quivering lips
Let me burn in your flamed tongue.
and the silence of your beating heart.

Let me string each passing day to
your eyelashes
Let me love you like the tolling wind.

Let me set afoot with your thought
to distant lands bathed in the
waters of dusk.
To hear them tell, stories of one thousand
and one errant desert nights.

Distant Woman.
Let me forge you
in my disappearing dreams.
Drown in your giant still eyes.

And if someday you miss the rain of kisses
I will set myself free, like a weeping cloud.

Seabreeze

In the stripped harbor
of a broken word,
a syllable,
the cloud opens to rain
the rain to river
and the river to the ocean.

A flickering wish
floats
on waves
drawing life from the
mourning salt,
my dancing flower.
Negotiating passage with
the storm and
the thread of water.

I recklessly look
for a seabreeze
to carry that wish,
in the closed, open
and half-open windows of
the mind.