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The girl is jazz, they say; soft to the touch
of note to ear, unresolving, 
like rooms muted with blue and maroon lights
where one can taste the color
of C minor to f major seven, the gentle drawl
of piano keys painted against a hushed snare.
I smell the smoke in her voice,
see a maduro cigar drawing a line
between index and thumb,
and ride…

You woke too soon to see your end.
If only you had stayed dreaming, stayed
while your valleyed eyes watched the flail
as it culled the corroded grain,
as it struck out the chaff
in you. The winds were no friend
as they slided what was left into the fields,
your fervent arms trying to grasp on escaping strands,
those dead things.

…

The sky paints itself around you,
your arms folded across your side
and bruised from the climb.
There is stillness that slides between
your scattered rocking, the leaning side
to side until revelation breaks like glass
in your mind, shatters itself across the fields below
and makes meaning out of what is only earth.

I look from a distan…

Hope is in the hands, you said,
your sweat falling like kernels
to the soil, your nails held firm into the wood,
without defense, without repose.

I remember a laugh like hiccups, a laugh
that did not know words like end or why.
You would say morning was newer each day,
how when we wake we set pace
for how the …

You send me typed letters
every Friday to my home in Georgia,
and I stuff them tight into my armoire.
I feel the soft feet of serif as I read them,
my eyes walking from line
to line; old stories of our trips to Oxford,
the hard press of stone cuts
spelling Latin on the walls.
Dulce amatoribus condere est, you pen,
and push …

There are colors that are silent, some that are not,
some that will shriek and till against the curtains
you insist we hang up, sides barely touching the walls.
I give you an odd look as we speak in church-tongues to one another,
abstract patterns that decorate our speech, flatten it
until it fits softly against the living room walls.
You are pleased a…