Aria
I will be whatever you want
drink from wet stones and remember
riding you to the musical voices
that rose from our bodies

I will go wherever you go
swim to Antarctica, dive with mermaids
in tropical blue waters where pelicans hover
and fish jump at the sound of your voice

The night is reminiscent of you, Giuseppe
when I am Maria echoing my song across hillsides
where demons of opera go to die, where
women have buried their lust, their longing, their truth

We both know, I was opera, I will always be
opera, tantalizing as the memory of making love
more relevant than the mere mechanics of bodies
swooning in a pumpkin-hued autumn

I remember when we sang, one aria and another
one opera, all open-mouthed
when the limes were fat on the tree
and the sun was coming up outside the window.

Ceremony

To make a ceremony, you have to travel far from the familiar; you have to leave the dust

of everyday strife behind and let the sky take you.

What’s more, to build a ceremony, you must have a patch of earth, some leafy sycamores

and a pine with dazzling cones.

You must spread rose petals on the earth, and everyone must sit in a circle, according to

their birth month.

There will be ants and spiders and your regrets in transparent hues, because everything is

sacred in the eye of the ceremony.

The ceremony will hold what you ask of it: birth and death, your ancestors and your chil-

dren, all of your sorrow and all of your joy, because you believe it can.

You believe in the circle, in the way the shaman sweeps the air around you, the way he

blesses you with sage. Belief is a shoe you’ve tried on many times and finally found

a fit. It’s not

that you suddenly believe in god more than you believe in yourself and in belief. You have

the courage to believe in belief, a benign transparency that hangs around long after

the photograph is shot.

Do you penetrate the veil?

Is there any veil at all?

What was and what is: the imagined realm and the real. We bury bones and sniff for our own

cocooned treasure, maybe for a lifetime—or eternity.

Rain
Singing, dreaming, counting fleas
You will always be that boy, that young boy
on a sheep’s back, all of it the same thrumming
of time’s ache in the gloaming;
Sun-up or sun-down, you are your twin.

Morning or evening gloam, I treasure both.
You, that young boy always that young boy,
like the disappearance of time and war
in the vague grey of politics, but how
can I remember what to do about the sun?

How it shines after the rain, and you, running,
you will always be that young boy, running
through puddles like a child, landing in my arms
like the boy I dreamed you were
in your rubber boots and rainsoaked skin.

You will always be that boy, that young boy
even when I confuse you with the man
you became, and the rain keeps on coming
for our innocence.