Hands

Tiny island palms
whose beaches
bear no rings.

Door Tempo

The phrase, in a measure,
of a door's squeak.
Memorized to sneak
in after dark.

This is my house, now.
That was my home, before.

Bury the hearth in snow
or fog; she will remember.

Lodge a heart to the hilt;
it, too, will find a way to
snap the latch, blind,
and put its beat to bed.

Container

Pitch these wooden desks and mugs
sprouting pencils into the sun, set ablaze
tools that clutter distance to ideas, if
at all ideas still seed.

I want to take a gardener's hand to
my life, burgle my own dead buds,
like the last night in a rented room,
cleared of a year's collections, when
I put music to the movement of
shadows and kept time in echo.

That night, a man whom I love,
was there. We harmonized like
cicadas crawling from earthy
incubators. Newborn with an
understanding too big to categorize,
too weighty to shelve, so laden were
we, we could only cry from parts of
our bodies for which we had no
name.