Love is the salvage of rapture.

A house built with lumber taken up

from the fallen-down dance hall

abandoned along Austin Creek

when Cazadero was a resort town.

Salvaged, stacked, hauled away;

the old square nails pulled,

new ones driven.

Patient, passionate, plumb, and true.

A house began at the end of a wrecking bar

and finished with shingles lapped in courses,

hammered down tight

against the hell-bent February winds

and the rainy-day raptures of flight.

A house big enough for privacy,

solid enough to hold the light,

the roof caulked at every seam

and the floor of maple tongue-and-groove

already worn smooth

by a thousand midnight waltzes

when it was Spring and the moon was full

and dancers seemed to glide on air,

the men nervously handsome,

the women with flowers in their hair.

Ghost town salvage, built from scratch.

Built by faith, and sweat, and care.

Listening into the materials hard enough to hear

the dancers’ laughter drift downstream

and puzzle the otters and owls.

Built of the pleasures that last beyond relief.

Built by the exacting of the real.

The refinement, not the seizure.

The diamond cutter,

not the diamond thief.

Plumb, square, and true.

The house way out at the end of the ridge.

The diamond in the dancers’ minds.

The amazing emptiness of moonlight

flooding the dance floor.

An Epithalamium for Victoria

ON THE OCCASION OF OUR MARRIAGE, OCTOBER 7, 1994

I touch your cheek

and another teleologist dies

of an apparent heart attack in a Fresno motel,

the ninth this week,

and the coroner is noticing similarities:

all men over 40;

first names beginning with the letter D;

all found clad only in pale blue boxer shorts

from Mervyn’s,

size Medium;

all displaying the same questionable use

of the semi-colon

in the anguished poems about their childhoods

left uncompleted on the chipped Formica desktops.

And that just when I touch your cheek.

When I touch your throat

(O sweet swooning Jesus and the radiantly

melting Buddha, too)

every tweed-weenie professor

who has mistaken an impenetrable vocabulary

for knowledge

and every high school teacher who has lied to a class

is struck dumb at the toll of midnight;

and all the politicians in the Western Hemisphere

drop to their knees, begging forgiveness;

and the last practicing existentialist,

after years of contemplating the intrinsic being

of an apple,

finally eats it.

Which moves me to kiss you

(Ah, lunar delirium; oh, raw unending diamond nova

of the sun)

and when our lips touch

every bird in flight folds its wings and glides,

and every bird at roost and babe unborn

dreams of turning its belly to the sun,

and the Northcoast is lashed with two weeks of

torrential rain

until a man snaps, screams

“There ain’t no head like steelhead,”

and hurls himself from the Hiouchi Bridge

into the swollen Smith

while an old woman in buckskins and cowboy boots

drops osprey feathers on the spot he hit, chanting

“Take him home, Momma, take him home.”