Blue thumb of water,

make me a high-seas sailor

among the pines and corn flats.

Fool me into smelling sea salts

instead of snow melt and Chicago.

Steal the shore from my eyes.

Call in the gulls.

Embolden your waves with the

boom of the ocean

and draw adventure up through my bones.

Shine my face with sea-burn

and send me home happy,

a man with the sea on his sleeve.

It's in clouds

scudding so low I can clench them.

The sky can't be wrestled into possession 

any more than my soul can balance

on the summit of a needle-point. 

I tumble down the escarpment,

ad nauseum,

to where the soil clots in my hair.

It's where I learned to climb.

Every so often

I want to scamper back up,

barefoot over boulders

to get the forest out of my feet,

rappel back down and drink 

with cupped hands from the wild stream,

to taste erosion from the rocks.

Languid,

like the shape you make

when you pour your coffee.

Impossible,

like the turns you take

when you drive us through the city.

Silent,

like the moments we fake

when there is nothing to say.

He never uses a word twice.

Articles went early. He's been a man

of sudden nouns and runaway verbs

ever since.

A specialist in the rare 

pink meat of language,

synonyms are his strength

though it weakens every day.

His speech has the strength of pastels

watering down the sky

to a color clenched in babies' blankets.

Meaning waffles into approximation. 

"Thin" replaces "flimsy" in a compromised clause.

He loses some implied movement

so he gestures.

Not in all the snow,

the clouds,

the churned waters,

have I found

the white

of a steeple

or

the white

in the grief of a starched collar.

She looks just like you,

puffy eyed,

blue stare.

The change never comes,

not how you will dream it should, anyway.

It’s slow with retrograde

days, but the change will come.

You’ll feel it in the 5am darkness of

“she needs me”, and she will,

and you go.

You scold me like a statue.

Erect silence, you know it kills me.

You’ve accomplished nothing to be so

cold. This reminds me

of a bold Washington pose somewhere near White Marsh,

off the tangle of new roads,

the bust of God moulding in the forest

the same as a stone bench .They’re everywhere

in the old parts of town. You said an outhouse

had been torn down on the estate, how sad you said,

but you grew up here so you can be sad.

Fort Washington, where we get off the turnpike,

no fort, just a Holiday Inn where you used to drink

before you should have been drinking,

a one-eyed pregnant girl in a story I’m glad you told me.

It is true, I killed a raccoon once,

back in the deep, wet hills of southern Indiana,

no dead presidents, no turnpikes, just a couple of

young Gods drunk on mercy.

They fell like molting feathers.

I watched with jacket over short-sleeves,

their dallying fall to earth,

their silence on the lips of April.

What would my last snow look like,

a shaking off of drywall dust,

cave thoughts melting in the sun,

flung into the warm chatter of her mud,

where nothing sticks but

barbecue sauce I dab from my useless mouth.

In his coffee he pours

a ribbon of whiskey

and then he sits

and he sips

this bleak electricity of the morning

and drawing on a cigarette

his awful mind

afraid and away

he begins with a word

thrown on a chalkboard-

choices.