2 poems

On the Rim of Heaven

Everything remains in the certainty of forgetting.
I wanted blindness in the long film of memory, the mysteries

of past cities thrown against the sky between the warring provinces.
There will be heaven among these holy sites and the songs

are almost crippling to hear now, the women of musical talent
from such distant shores. You have felt what the world is like

but those moments have passed and I run upstairs again to listen
for the beginning of all things, racing for the open sea.

These lines become meaningless like the likenesses of souls
confined to sweetness in the birth pangs of another century.

Sunday at Dawn

It may be you were born
under similar circumstances, that the air you breathe
draws blood just as easily, that in the undertow we share
the seasons are aligned
and the poems that we’ve kept quiet
have flooded the distance of our bruises…

It’s true, I’ve cried too much
to allow myself the benefit of compromise
holding tight to the nights I spent
under birdless skies

before I talked with the sun
and the city I had, filled with angels
in their white dresses, kept vigil
in a swirl of sparrows.

In tramping through those streets
we looked for what remained of September
as the gashes healed making room for the frayed
    edges of our fingers.

Our spiral ringed notebooks still missing,
I held you for a summer.