ON BELL STREET

I catch my wife again
crying in the upstairs bedroom
because the man across the street
is standing naked in his window.
Again.
She says it is an old form of love
and before I can do anything she has raised
the blinds and is showing him her tits.
The neighbor's face flashes with tears.

She will spend the rest of the day
asking me to account for all this sadness.
And I will sit and stare at the trees
and the deer in the carpet
and wish I could find a woman like her.

SR 232

We speed through clear night, rolling countryside,
the road dimmer than bone on the black land,
at times coming to the top of a hill
like the prow of a ship thrust out
toward hydrogen star clouds, burning distance.
The lid is off the world: we drive faster
toward a line of hills like animals sleeping
on their sides.  The headlights brighten
a face of trees
waiting it out, a horse
standing dead still against a fence,
not trying to see.
This is a dark planet
with no natural light,
ruminative
and shamed
in its own shadow.

DEEP FIELD

     a reaction to the Hubble photograph
     of the farthest visible galaxies
 
It is not the distant glitter
of a city far off
across a dark bay,
a city where,
if only you could
stand the brine
in the nostrils, the bone chill
of the waves
for just long enough,
you could arrive
among the lights of lives
warm and indoors and sleepy,
each room in its own untouchable past.

It is not the unfocused spangle
of her eyes,
nor the frozen splinters
of the glass
she smashed
on the black polished marble.
Nor is it wonder
exploding
in the brain
or a child's spinning toys.
It is not even time
as they say it is,
although everything is time.

It is simply a sheet of paper,
glossy with chemicals,
sliding easily under your fingers,
all you will ever touch
of zero.
It is where
you will never go.
Nor should you
since it is
beyond evil and
whatever is beyond that.