What Is and Was

There are good things, but they do not occur to you.
Maybe it is more correct, they do not happen
Maybe that they do not exist for you
They are just the same as they were when we
Could exist together,
Twisting dreadlock between forefingers
Jumping my body off ledges
Checking mailboxes for package-slips
Like there is a great clarity, now that I am looking
Through things to what is there. I can see better.
Through glass, through impurity right to it.
You most undear now.

Poems I wrote when I was nineteen

and I went to the coast to work at a Quaker camp in Maine.

Composed
I hope you fall in love and only wonderful things happen. I hope dragonflies
swarm around shoulders when you walk past still ponds, and you think about
magic, and maybe begin to believe. I hope that warmth you feel when she laughs
heals everything broken, and ugly, and scared inside you. I hope your dumb human
bodies keep each other's warm. I hope you fall in love with a girl, and I hope
it is beautiful and miraculous and wild.

Maps
If we became
snail-sized
then our known worlds
would exist as the
flowering fields we moved through
encompassing the entirety
of yellow-shelled lives
and we wouldn't think of "sky"
and we wouldn't think of "horizon"
and then that empty distance
between our two smooth bodies
would be incomprehensible,
instead of aching.

Offertory
cupped the clear water of
these days in my hands, and
I saw your visage
wrinkle the surface.
stillness.
and then the days
slipped through finger spaces
to puddle round the roots
of begonias and lilies
that offer themselves
up
like palms in prayer