Bellas Artes

I went to the museum

I rode the metro

And admired all of the fine arts:

The art of walking

The technique of sitting

The beauty of a yawn

Harmonied laughter

Lines of colour

Curling smoothly beneath laughing eyes

There are brushstrokes

In the arcs of walking feet

The swish of jeans

Falling waves of falling hair

And the way we position ourselves

Around each other on the train

Beauty and desperation

Splashes of red and blue

The shade and shape

Of a nose or cheekbone.

The First Heaven: Oklahoma Storm

The peace opens when the winds

Section drones down to a dull moan

The thunder clap applause rumbles off

Like a freight train

The eye, eyes up, run outside

When-the-alarms-go-off Oklahoma

Feel the West, the weight, the

Breeze of the Rockies, heat of the plains

Lift up your sails

We will build sailboats of popsicle prayer

Sticks with a cross on top

Hoping that You'll take us up

Walking around in this cielo

The first heaven

This wholly ground

Beneath our kicks

Caught up in the rapture, the great

In between

The virga score stretched across

Horizontal lines the tracks

The moan

The hop-a-train temptation let's see

Where we go

We're all the fall leaves

Newspapers flopping around the Metro

Faded headlines dimly calling for

Attentions affections

The silence

Are you not interested in me?

See you not my

Grand humanity?
Or am I past my date of issue?

I fear it

I may fall in love or judge

Or find empathy

I'm a head-on-the-shoulder but also
A shoulder-to-the-plow

Shoulder of the road passing by

No place to rest a( )head

Chasing

While the storm breathes passion

And barometric pressure

Did we forget it?

Numbing games, numbing jobs

Numbing drugs, numbing loves

Nothing as sweet as the rain on the skin

The dancing lights reflecting on

Slick streets and windshields

It makes my heart pirouette inside me.

Lines

I seem to have forgotten my lines...

Walk with me parallel a while

Pickup perhaps then I'll remember

I have no steady, no gyroscope to keep me up

At night the sleepcycle rides

     circles under my eyes

I haven't decided how to draw us

All of us--everyone we meet--

Intersect at certain points,

Moments of meaning

Millions of points where we touch, hold hands

Share a song, kiss, secret, or glance

Sometimes we run parallel for a time

Walking a bold line through space time

As everything spins we manage to keep step

But it's all temporary

Our made-in-China shoes scuff the graph

     paper as we approach infinity

And what nonsense is that

A closeness, a net?, a communion, or an empty

     space, a universal alone eternity?

I scribble along fast like a polygraph lie as I, trying

     not to forget to breathe

Trying not to veer wildly like my chestbeat

     and double back, cross myself,

My God I've been here before

I was hoping we could tie the knot

But the telephone line was not long enough

You ride along another axis now,

Existing, loving, singing, unseen

I always dreamed of your trajectory

Plotting it out, stoking you to dream

Your truck spiraled out

A flat line, an ellipsis

Of rocks in the desert, memorial gardens

I take pictures

Make five-year plans

See lines in everything:

Handprints, walls, sunsets, trees

Each barcode a stanza,

Every vine and weed draws shapes

And you and me

We part here, branching out like

     family trees approaching infinity

And although like particles we may

     collide, we will never occupy the same

     space and time

At best our lines run tangent

But not yet, I reach

You're out of reach

You're gone

And I'm still writing on writing on moving out past the sea

Living, yes, writing reading speaking moving always moving