eager with each other, wild,

fierce and sweet

in those first permissions,

stunned, possessed.

Married, three children,

a ranch above the river,

still able to delight each other with who we were–

that’s all I ever really wanted.

Half-sunken, half-emerged,

she points as the Heron flies, as its shadow

folds with the copper shadows of nightfall.

I build a fire on the bank and wait.

Tired, silent, the children go down

and wash their faces in the river.

Waiting for Houdini to Come Up

Magic is not the manipulation of appearance.

It is the expropriation of the real.

Not mastered sleights blurred with patter

but the actual rabbit in every hat.

No tricks. Not the key to the shackles

from her mouth to his

passed in a good-luck kiss

just before they chain him in the trunk

and drop it in the cold, real river.

Not the key, but the kiss itself,

tender, fearful,

as wild as the release within us

when he floats out of the weighted trunk

and from the river bottom begins to rise,

escaping the skilled deceit,

freed from the illusion of escape.

The Countessa

Last night I made love to my passionate countessa

as the Panonia Express

flashed by villages we only saw

as shivers of light

on the green enameled roof of the sleeping car.

Gone an undreamable distance beyond

that first kiss in Budapest,

nearly to Prague,

flaying the moon

as Czechoslovakia slipped under our bodies,

our moans sweetened the iron clatter

of rail and wheel

as we melted with pleasure.

When I woke at the Berlin station

she was gone.

She left a piece of ivory

curled in my hand.

Destroyed by strength

as much as weakness.

By the ravishing, bare-back, fantastic countessa,

by Guinevere, Mary, the moon,

the love invented against loneliness,

the heart exhausted by the mind.

Destroyed by the translucence

at the tip of a root.

The sound of a cello in an empty hall.

By what you can give and what you can take.

Lost by imagining what we cannot know

and knowing what we cannot have.

Believing love will bear us away

down the River of Babylon

to the rumored garden lush with pears.

Wanting it all at once,

the journey consumed

in a blaze of moonlight and dream

so pure even the ashes burn

into the color of her camisole.

And we, as if we’d been denied,

are left wanting even more.

The warmth of her body barely alive

in the piece of ivory curled in our hands.

Venison Stew

for Freeman House

I could grow old with you, Freeman,

two woodrats drunk half the time

in a shack way up the Klamath,

with not much left to do

but complain about our teeth and livers,

wonder where the money went,

and watch the river move.

Once a month, if we can beat

another old pickup into running,

we’ll clatter down to Eureka for supplies,

maybe give them kids some gambling lessons