Poem: Morphing

This is the difficulty with love:
its ability to escape permanence,
the morphing from shape to shape,
once a bird now a balloon and later on
a kite released during a dead day.

This is what awareness brings: knowing
that we will be left with clothes scattered
on the floor, debris of another night,
candlewax melting maps across the wood
pockmarked with scalpel scars.

I am reminded of another man,
another field full of grass, taller
than us, another bed. How can love
move from one vessel to another,
like liquid, like leaves blown across the street?

Poem

Pre Tense

This is another letter addressed to absence.
A shadow in the corner lurks, waiting for the delivery
of the envelope, brown and old, scented with wood shavings,
tears, old cloth. Another pen writes another poem
for a man long gone, left for a colder clime,
a colder woman. This is a cycle we are familiar with -
the shift from light to dark, presence to absence,
another bedspace with the imprint of another body,
the sheets slowly dissolving into its soft and proper shape.

Poem? (Haha)

This is how memory attempts to eclipse itself:
covering the tattered edges of that which we cannot

accept, as a seamstress runs needle and thread
over the smoother surfaces of satin, silk, cotton

warp and weft, folding edges and tucking corners.
Seamless, we say when there are no corrections,

only a line that stretches from here to here, an attempt
at perfection. Beneath this, we measure everything

else in terms of exactness.