The trouble with desire

Is the world wearing you down?
I pined for it.
And still, despite long years
Of falling short, I still do.

So easy to sink into bitterness
To collect reasons, to blame
This or that, to stand upon contempt
As if it were a fit foundation

As if it weren’t just envy
Of other lives grasped whole
And lived without restraint
Right or wrong

We’re instruments, finely tuned
To one another
So all our joys and disappointments,
Trials and victories, lapses and vindications

Are funneled willy-nilly
Into dreams of each other
Nothing to be done; it’s what we are
It’s how we see what’s real

How we hold it up to available light
How we learn and unlearn
How we cling to threads
Ever unraveling

How it was

Maybe you counted on my sense of duty
To fill in your dreams
Or thought that in the end
All things would come around
To what you found obvious

To me, it was a shabby storefront
Cheap gilding framed the doorways
Loudspeakers blared assumptions
Crackling, as if through faulty wiring,
Or being consumed by fire

Sooner or later, I thought,
Collapse will come
My choices: cower, embrace the rubble,

Or leap free

A winter quartet

I

Daybreak
Orion long since fled,
The new moon cradles the old,
With Venus, that old voyeuse,
Standing watch,
All the sky ablush

II

Temperatures drop slowly
From the unblue, steel-gray sky,
The promise of snow revoked
In response to some
Imagined slight.
Across the low-slung day,
Footprints.

III

Finally, snow,
Fierce and bitter
No longer willing or able
To hold its rage against
The lingering autumn,
At the tress clinging absurdly
To their dead.

IV

A Sahara of snow,
Windblown and duney,
Bereft only of camels,
Piled like so much longing,
Like so many
Cancelled appointments.

On cats

A cat
Is a cat
You got a problem
With that?

Fate and the seasons

The gray sky matches perfectly
The weathered tarmac
A sense of time already gone

Cars straddle gutters
The shuttered faces of the crowd
Loom in procession
Each bearing the meaning
Of the spiraled helix
A mirror of destiny
Of inevitable withering

Still, there is that window box
With the last petunias
Of the season