The Other Continent

The sound. It is painful here.

The gray world turns ice to ice.

Rain from the sky fall hard as stones

and cluster over the ocean,

silvering with cold white.

The wind is never light -

its density pounds the land.

It eternally howls

about the zero

the negative

the never was

the naught.


The wind demands a mountain

to stop it from its path.

Not this emptiness

more vast than itself

Endlessly spreading

in the absence of desire.


September 20, 2005.  This one's older than this blog.

Courting

The wrinkle around your eye is quite unreadable -
how it forms without a twitch on your face, confounds.
Is it the temperature? 34 degrees hot
slapped on your cheeks by a disturbed wind?
Did an ant crawl unnoticeable on your skin?
Is it something I said? Which word
in a parade of adjectives meant to woo
comes off insincere?
The table is like an endless sea between us.
I lost the sail that directs my trail of thoughts.
How drops of seconds feel like oceans of years
while you sit like a moon on a divan of clouds
throwing off beams of hints that may be as glum as no
or radiant as an affirming reciprocation.