i loved you when i still thought that love was as pure as your heart,
directed like tides by the moon

i loved you when i still thought that you were pure of heart

this theory i now must
disprove:

you are not the boy i was introduced to
years ago, i don't remember by whom
you wore your vietnam vet ensemble

and i began a long history of loving you

now it's all as bitter as the limes
on my grandmother's tree

you're drinking cheap whiskey and
smoking in the heat

only the songs you bring
and not the things you do
are sweet

drudged through the mud and long awoken
from a fleeting reverie

you've always given your love away for free

because the nature of our love was that
it belonged to you and me

exchanged between our lungs like smoke
young pretty things

you gave me smokey robinson

i let myself sing
and so did you

of
the tracks of our tears

the dark, and otis redding--

when i think of a passionate
and long abiding
love

i think of my love for the dark

how it hides and also does not hide
because it obscures the speaker
but gives its words
their own lives

and brings silence with it

the sort of silence that serves as a vast backdrop for
the soft screeching of crickets and maybe the quiet
crash of the cold
but calm
sea

numbing when i dragged my feet through it last night
i was patient because i knew that it was right:
all the stars would arrive

in the darkness everything looks like the sky, like
the record player i hear crackling in my mind

the way it spins itself into a revolving universe of black wax

somehow manages to conjure
otis redding

and i am his fool once more

spring returns

i doubt we'll meet again
as you are headed that way
and i've been going this way for some time

i doubt we'll meet again in the spring as we once did
pressed upon by the santa anas
nearly naked in the heat

i doubt we'll ever meet that ropeswing again
at least i doubt our hands will curl around it at the same time
our feet wrapped around the knot that trails through the water
as it sways

springs returns
as it has done
as it does despite the fact

that every time i feel the sun touching my shoulders
or my hands

i think i cannot stand it
it is too much like you
too much like the way you touched me when we both could understand

why it shone so bright