a man of less experience might have swooned–

while he, nearing 50 years, merely staggers,

his moan choked to a whimper,

puddled with desire,

yet lucid enough to appreciate

his utter confusion about what he feels

for this young woman,

and what, if anything, he should do.

Motives are seldom pure,

but he’s not even sure

what he wants to be:

the stone, its warmth, her cheek,

the river, ocean, or the sun inside

the moon burning inside her–

all, none, or some complex combination of possibilities

that he knows enough to know eludes him.

But he knows beyond knowledge

that the rain-swollen river, strong and slow,

moves the way she would be touched,

and he wants to open his hands and touch her like that,

at the melting threshold between glide and swept,

swirling borders, rolling depths,

Mozart weaving milky emerald silk,

all caught and curled in that flowing poise

of wet coil, chrome spark.

The Prior and Subsequent Heavens

In the night’s most present moment–

non-duplicable, gone–

the starlight on our faces

was a million light-years old.

I changed.

You changed too.

The light went on.

We change beyond choice,

bound to the universe

as congruent events

of its endless origin

as well as its momentary whereabouts,

each breath and heartbeat subject

to an absolute relative

spatio-temporal plenitude

of possibilities, delusions, and births,

arrangements and derangements,

properties, principles, and mysterious powers,

some as strict as gravitation,

some as random as a lizard in the soup.

You change it.

I do too.

I was trying to write the history of an instant,

to sustain the exact point

where it opened into song,

joined the sunlight shaping the river,

the starlight on our faces,

the fire under the bubbling soup.

You dove from the opposite shore

and swam toward me with the moon in your throat,

body gliding underwater

like the shadow of a bird.

Your passage changed the current,

changed the river,

changing you and me.

What we know is never the same.

It scatters like starlight in the mind;

fades into the future it creates:

nothing lost, nothing gained, going on

as the mutable condition of mortal grace.

This starlit song began along the river,

singing with you in the summertime dusk,

barefoot and cuddled on the cooling sand

waiting for the stars to emerge in this world,

as the slow green river gathered our shadows,

singing at the top of our voices

till our toes curled,

and I changed into you changing too.

Not for ever, maybe,

but for sure.

Old Growth

They wheel my gurney into the colonoscopy

procedure room,

a procedure for which I’ve been prepped by a night

of GI lavage, employing an inaptly named laxative

called “Go-Lightly,”

followed by two tap-water enemas,

cleansing my alimentary canal so thoroughly

I imagine my intestines as shiny as chrome at a

roadster show–

shiny, that is, except for the blood that has brought

me here,

having lost half my red-cell volume by the time