Tres Poemas

When I Say She Means the World to Me

She has been my starry night 

since before paint speckled her 

with unnamed constellations, 

before my hand spread a galaxy across her cheek. 

Before I left her silhouette

in the fresh wet white on the wall behind her,

there she was, sparkling in my sky.

Somewhere beneath the sun and his mistress moon,

I came to know her, heard her part 

in the Earth's subtle song and danced her to it.

I came to know her in the geologic time we spent 

learning how our bodies could be celestial.

Even now, my every dawn rises to a world of her

full of the wishes I've made on every star of her

and a hundred thousand thousand scenes

of what has, what is and might have been,

and a million more of maybes.

Her stars are older now, but their light

no less the guide by which I set my course

and no matter how far away in distance, speed, or time,

I point my bow toward her horizon and sail gladly into her sunset.

She has been my starry night,

my evening and my morning star,

the sun, the moon, the world itself,

my art, my muse, my song, my dance,

and still I'd give her every all of me

to make of her my universe.

The Fall

Last night, 

a fire burned through Camelot.

Its embers and ashes

cloud the smoky air of Her court

while breath rattles with a cough

in the tight confines of Her chest.

His Queen, and mine,

holds her palms to the last flames for warmth

and shivers in the chill its dying leaves behind.

There was no arson here.

Even a well-tended fire

sometimes escape's its hearth,

burns hot and fast

and takes her world with it.

And I, the stalwart knight,

can but watch the ash settle in her hair,

like some callous snowfall

painting her grey 

except for the trails

washed clean by her tears.

Amiga

Seasons have come and gone in this dance of ours.

We have known winters, mi querida, yet through them all

this fierce, tiny stove of mine burned brightly for you

and warmed me through the silent fall of snow.

Even that same snow, beyond the bounds of metaphor,

which I already loved, I love still more

for the holes our frozen fingers left

as they crafted the snowballs we flung at each other

and for its tingling as it fell and melted on our noses

as we walked across the blanket

its sifting left across the land.

You have always been this way for me, 

memories tied inexorably to the joys in my life.

I can no longer tell where one begins and the other ends.

You are sweet peach wine and nearly the depth of red.

You are dance, the music and the movement.

You are tango, the lessons I teach.

You are white paint, the painting of kitchens,

that one movie about love in a French Vineyard

and the couch where we sat to watch it.

You are puppies and holiday parties,

long nights talking just to have a few more seconds together,

our eyelids heavy with the weight of sleep.

You are the scent of desire, unsated.

You are my songs, the chords coaxed from my guitar.

You are Spanish, even as it stumbles from my tongue.

Each word, each image, each drop of the Mnemosyne

fuel for the cheery blaze that staves off the lonely cold,

you are the fire, my heart the stove.