City

Our prayer calls meet near the tops of buildings,
dissonant, but exactly made for being together.

In the valleys of the city the night is pooling.
It fills our places window by window.

The city flows easily through our stakes and claims,
having it's own business to attend to.

And when I am gone, I feel the city calls me.
When I am here, I feel alone.

Hallway

I woke in the hall holding a loaded gun
with the safety disengaged
Later, I went back to my life
because nothing had happened.

When you've loved someone for a while
it's a good idea to practice up on being alone.

Step 1: Go away for awhile. Don't say where you've been.
Come back without apology and reclaim your chair.

Step 2: Keep saying "I love you" until the words abandon meaning
the way a girl abandons virginity -
because she suspects it isn't worth it.

Step 3: Tell me the exact moment you stopped loving me.
Call it on a stopwatch - to the hundredth second.
Write it on the toe tag of my soul.

August (Revision)

In the evening of the hottest day it rained.
It rained as if the day had been waiting all day to rain,
parting the heat of the city with broad strokes.
Afterwards,
rain dripped from leaves and branches
for hours.

Riding in the car, left side window seat,
Texas Hill Country whizzing by,
waves of drying grass scratching along fence lines
in the hot exhaust of Autumn.
In overcast you can watch the rain’s slant,
distant and vague,
like God or the year after next year.
I think of silence
stretching across the flat plains to the horizon -
my brother beside me sleeping soundly.

I realize slowly, in a chill –
I wake up often in the same sweat –
the inconceivability of forever,
non-existence, inevitable,
like the faded grass shoulder, endlessly blurring,
humming us deathward.

The Artist's Revisions Dissected

Under the painting was a better painting.
but under that was a plain canvas