Cinnamon Angel Wings at Signe's Heaven-Bound Bakery


Crunchy, sweet, outside on Signe’s patio, touch of bliss
on the tongue, smear of lost kisses, the young woman
offering coffee refills from a giant push-handle carafe
that dispenses 20 years of forgiveness, a millennium less
in purgatory.  What wind what sun what odor of unnamed
white buds disappearing between the gloss of salt-known
leaves.  Strides caked with sand.  Beach-damp sweaters a half-
sigh, life gone baggy, gone singing where palmettos bend
to the God of blown cheeks, the damsels with moss-hung hair.
This you and I a tart sprinkle on the world’s flat palm, a mere
jiggle, a sonorous dream.  Or pock and whack when the eyelids
unstick a dawn, and pelicans ungroup in mid-air, yet slide
into each other’s wake, a gravity their tug, where moon might
tumble yet stay put in the vacant sky, the burned-out night.      





Listening to the Nightingale


A flycatcher, not a thrush.  Just before dawn not a
harbinger or mistress, but impossible to know in the
woods of home.  In Croatia, I found you on a coin,
quietly staring at the Adriatic.  In the Rhineland,
you were climbing the scales, trilling above traffic.
Elsewhere, you are drawn to the rose, celebrating
yourself, and I congratulate my hearing, my invisible
spirit that leans toward the darkness you dispel,
where blessings begin to appear, petals shrug off
their dew, lovers walk through fog, your distant 
appeal like Whitman’s widowed bird calling to his
mate—this the melody of grief, the memory of storm,
nocturnal scribble on the air, a pulse that signifies and
withdraws as the sun dreams its way back into morning.

These poems are from my chapbook, Little Songs, originally published by the online journal Mudlark.