Key West Sheaf
Four poems for Miranda

Foreword:

Years ago, the late Judson Jerome compared my poems to those of Hart Crane -- still one of my most cherished compliments.  The odd thing was that, until Jerome made the comment, I'd never read Crane, an oversight I immediately corrected.
     
Now, after having apparently channeled Crane's style -- and taken his initials --  I'm stealing from the old boy again.  One of his collections is titled "Key West:  An Island Sheaf."  These poems are for the extraordinary person I met in Key West over Christmas holiday in 1998.



Where We, Eternal
For Miranda


In the frozen tundra the seed soft and constant, waiting,
in the airways above Scotland, the Atlantic, the Outer Banks,
where life stays now, springs soon,

in between is where we are

have always been, talking our strange conversations
mingling our eau de vie tastes
and walking the sun-drenched streets


or cuddled on chilly couches
Lapsang Souchong and cookies
and soft lips sweet with Chardonnay.

the sun comes up on us      the headlights catch us

and the subtropics grow around our twined hands
A distancing taillight's chill awaits us
yet we have grown so together

until below and above are only levels

and life is but an aquifer,
a water, a door that carries through
the swim, the entry, our motion

and no grave, no transportation

can make a difference
no age, no hate
can have a chance

against us, we here and now,
the dream come face to face
for both of us

and we caught it
just before it got away


to permafrost, to flight.

                      • • •

Key West Cemetery, Boxing Day, 1998
For Miranda


The ribbed metal gates, thrown open
reveal the bleached heart of an island
bone up under concrete

or sunken in cheek-shallow graves.
We kiss long enough to bring deep breaths
on the pathway between, two slim pretty birds

preening and stroking, nameless and pagan
amid the stone chiseling
and reverence for the dead.

Nameless child, this now we have created,
two heads and one heart, focused
on the gift of speech and kisses

succulent as peaches,
variegated with each mouthful.  Forever
lies still in front of us, in back of us.

*****

The clouds furl dark capes and bring breezes.
We scurry for strong, smoky tea
at Roz's house nearby.  On the way,

I squeeze you tight, steal another kiss,
realize I want you with me
for whatever eternity we have,

this sad, happy, beautiful present
where with each opening
the door confronts all possibilities


and the door carries
the grass on its back.

                  • • •

3686
For Miranda

January.  I swear these chilling breezes
bring me the clean scent, the soft nuzzle
of simply kissing your cheek, your hair.

On a map my fingers trace
Scotland's coast as they traced your jaw line.
Then stray across the Atlantic to here

as over your slender back
and arms.  My sense of direction
has improved, thanks to you.

*

Hours before we met Christmas day
I stared out onto that ocean,
not yet seeing it as a riddle

whose distance I had to solve.
The bergs that dashed the Titanic,
the sheer space that daunted Columbus --

and the way back to you
might come one wavelet at a time.
But your voice and your memory

are sparks for my heart, my engine.
Three thousand six hundred and eighty-six miles away,
something so sweet I taste it, so dear I feel it, here.

As I say, you've improved my sense of direction.
Sometimes I turn my car and drive
a mile or two toward the beach


just to be a little closer.

               • • •

Meditation on Miranda

I had a plain black frame
in my living room window corner.
It symbolized emptiness,

the Zen ideal.

Now your photo
fills it perfectly.  I don't know
what that symbolizes,

but it beats the hell
out of emptiness.

         • • •

Morning Ablutions
For Miranda

A naked man looks ludicrous
in slippers

but his bathroom tiles
are cold.

He wonders if you'd find him
cute anyway.

Consider how he carefully shaves
that underlip stubble

each day, to save irritation
under your sweet lips

should you miraculously appear
to kiss him then and there.

Using the same shaving cream,
remembering your own sweet scents

and softness.  He wants to remember this.
He doesn't want to take off the ludicrous slippers

and feel the coldness of distance
against me.  But he shaves and smoothly,

eventually, shod, steps out
and faces the world

that without you looks
as ludicrous


as a naked man in slippers.

                 • • •

Of Distance As Friend
A Shakespearean sonnet for Miranda

All distance is divided into three parts:
Memory ... imagination ... and the choice
To diminish or elevate them in our hearts.
I remember, I imagine, choose elevation, and rejoice.
Distance posits you and I as its outer poles;
Thus it must be somehow closest to your touch,
A chilly friend for us exiled souls.
It defines how close the closeness I want so much.
Nature abhors a void.  Distance, as such, oft
Invites my love to expand, to imagine and remember:
My affection is as your fragrant bath, caressing your skin soft
Surrounding and soothing, warm and subtle as an ember.
I'll keep imagination and memory, but let distance's friendship dissolve, And let undistanced kisses and devotion around our world revolve.

                        • • •

All Night Rain
For Miranda

This business of distance.  It's never straightforward,
is it?  Tonight late -- morning, your time --
I awake to the raindrops' snaps and chuckles.

I fell asleep to the same.  If only I could say that
for your voice, your touch, though God knows
the phone lines lifted hours of you across my threshold.

So it's raining, and I can hear it only
because it chooses to tap at my window.
This means, like Shakespeare's course of true love,

it doesn't run smooth.  Droplets on the pane
tell me of windblown angles:  this rain,
my bedtime comfort, my early alarm.

*

Our moon is obscured, of course, but so are you
for the present.  That doesn't make either
any less with me now.  People don't understand

this distance and what it does
to mad ones like ourselves.
We write around it, talk through it,

spin a cocoon from the tightrope we stretch between it
as two kids with strings and cans would
had they this magic.

*

The wind slaps droplets on the glass.
I sleep on the couch and risk back spasms
to hear it better.  Because the rain

has something of you in it.  You, who chose
to sweep your grace and beauty away
from whatever path it was taking

and into my life.  Faced with the fragility
of your decision -- the rain is still with me --
I build the poem as a wall around it.

I dream we catch a bucket of rainwater,
take the cement between us
and fashion a future.

*

Distance is never straightforward.
Read this poem now, and it's raining again,
though the showers have long passed.

The poem.  The couch.  The rain.
Little monuments to what it takes to preserve,
to hallow, to make something true and beautiful

of the transience that passes for life.
Walking to the kitchen in the midst of this
I saw my basil plant wilted and watered it.

In the morning it will be full
and green with gratitude.
Give sustenance

and it will grow.
This is what
the wind and rain,

like a frame
around your image in my mind,

said.

           • • •

Concorde
For Miranda

A sigh is expelled.
As from the Garden,
something done in  frustration
or love.  A double sigh, here,
love frustrated;  the tree bearing such fruit
blooming in another land.

Fly with me, frustrate frustration
with the intake
of a breath so fresh
jet engines leap at its oxygen.
Eden is within us.  The apple dangles
between us.  I dream

we take a bite together;
the distance lessens
and the creation myth begins.

Sharing this rib we become whole


           
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