I reach from a long-ago 
summer of a hundred flowers
to rock the dangling touch-me-not, 

close my eyes to thumb 
through pages of Peterson 
for the name of tiny white bells.

You are here because I’ve placed you so -
in a slip from temporal ties, 

a pooling of yesterdays
and tomorrows where daisies 
and buttercups are the prophets 
of love and tastes on toast.

In the woods, periwinkles and trilliums -
here your hands conduct 
the biorhythms of shadows,
draw an insular space around me.

The sun’s song slows 
to a dignified largo above 
the gambrel ceiling of leaves

and there is the linen cool 
of moss at my back,
the hot press of your mouth
seeking my small noises.

                 All I can give - 
these thoughts, these daydreams, 
warm and clear as consommé. 
I feed them to you by teaspoon 
in the waning light of an afternoon. 

She twists Nebraskan 
braids into a high coronet 

as he puts the chill 
of the ocean around her neck

to incubate for later,
infuse with her heat. 

He hypnotizes with "trust me";
she whispers, "yes, love me"

and opens her body to hands
and tongue, cultured gin and pearls

only to wake in a juniper fog -
the empty shape of him held

in a shroud of stiffened sheets,
the last of his warmth for her

lingering in coffee grounds.
"Love me love me love me"

the parrot chants her mantra
over dinner on a tv-tray. 

A soiled dove championed 
by black-and-white cowboys,

she'd saddle the horse 
but the horse is only coconuts.

Instead she levitates above 
sidewalks of gin-soaked rains,

erases the night's submission
inside walls of neon and smoke.

A prickly juniper bush
crouching small and low,

there she can forget where 
he put his mother's pearls. 

Copyright © 2002-2003 PJ Nights. All Rights Reserved. May not be re-printed in any form without express written consent of the author. Do not copy or post.