When my lover became my enemy
I made my bed amongst winds
and drove the old road ’ till my heart crashed.
Where’ s the bypass?

Washing my shirts, wringing them out.
Hung in the breeze.

Water skips
undressed
over outcrops.

What it says is.

Wind,
roots in rock.

Lying on Long Tongue,
sun diffused in mist.
Easy sleep
without waking.

The love we’ ve defined for ourselves
in privacy, in suffering,
keeps both of us lonely as a fist,
but does intimacy mean a happy ending?
I’ m afraid of marriage.
Driving past them at night, the shadows
on a drawn curtain hide terrible lives:
a father stuck in a job, his daughter
opening her blouse to strangers.

Here we are
in our doughboys and camos, our doughty frocks
with drips of bitter on the sleeve, our passions revving
their pulp to pittance at a gas station
in the city that never peeps —

One does not want,
O Lord, to heap
Up by still waters
Of words a cairn
But hopes to attend
A small covert
Of tamarisk
Whose leaves salty
Yet feathery
Will shed light over
A thickened plot.

One wants at last
To cede the field
To tamarisk
And mastic tree,
To olive and stone,
Stones in the fruit,
Seed in the stones.