Two Poems

I, myself, remember

The plunge

Into water so icy

I burned.

You

Sat in the sun

Wearing a leaf-dappled dress

That danced with the whirlwind,

Promising nothing.

The way of a man with a woman,

The way of a snake on a rock,

Is the way of the world.

---

 

Memory is an immigrant

Wandering, with thirst as a possession

Along

A faint trail through the night-shrouded forest

Of the past,

Palimpsest clues queried anxiously

In search of destiny, or security, or even

A smile.

The chase becomes the chase

Of the chase.

Or a moth, somnolent by day,

Alive by devious design only

At night,

Circling, circling, circling

For no earthly reason but compulsion

Around the fiercely bright flame

Of a midsummer fire-memory,

Until the mad thinker

Consummates

Existence in the transformation.

Or a fugitive at night,

Moving stealthily, illegitimately,

Purposely

Until he vanishes from the careful eyes

And florid demands

Of being.

What he was, with whom, becomes

Inexact.

Molecules and atoms flee his particular.