I must make everything smaller.

Once, my tongue reached through the trees
beyond the atmosphere,

once at least once my tongue tasted God.

Now, I am one who names.

Sand grain, grape pip, America—
yes, even you, even God.

Let me tuck you insidemy toddler’s shirt pocket.

See how free his tiny feet are?

Do you remember—you who also began nameless,

much larger than you are now,
small hands, shirt pocket, feet? 

With your unnamed longing infinite,
your named longing infinite, too.

—Published by Poetry Northwest

When the you who isn’t you calls
the me who isn’t me, and says,
Meet me in the East Village,
I’ll walk forty blocks or more,
however far you like through the city.
I’ll wake and dress at any time of night
and meet you beneath the glow
of tall buildings, weaving through
lines of theater patrons, the throngs
in Times Square sending
images of images to distant area codes,
and want the you who isn’t you
to know the me who isn’t me is good
at listening, that my ears are dishes
you could drop your keys into,
my face a coffee table to abandon
your warm shoes beneath, as if
your thoughts have just arrived
home after a long day in the city.
Following dinner, drinks. And after
I won’t speak a word, listening
down the Avenue of the Americas,
only listen and nod over iron grates,
on slats of moonlit park benches,
listening to how the longing makes
even the thought of prayer impossible,
how you entered the cathedral off 97th
and discovered you had lost
the cathedral inside yourself. I’ll say
nothing as we carry on past theaters
now dark, and when finally we stop
outside your door, the you who isn’t you
will say nothing more, will wrap
your arms around the me who isn’t me,
press a cool ear against my ear,
and hear me tell you I love, and tell you
I love—what else, after all, is left
for the me who isn’t me to say?

–Published by The Shallow the Ends

There’s a fire, then no fire.
Ash, charred earth, wind—.  

A cloud that eventually disappears,
matter that never does.

Particulate that lingers in the lungs,

the lungs two wineskins
full, nearly bursting.

Until not. Until there’s only
what was and what still is:

A vineyard; smoke
and what was a vineyard.

The future of the land,
and the past already harvested—

in a great warehouse on the town’s edge,
moonlight passes through windows,

the moon held in barrels of liquid
bottled, then poured into glasses—

There’s the wind,
the rain that will or won’t come.

There’s how the wine begins,
not as fruit, on stem,

but first as water flowing over stone,
then diverted to the rows on hillsides—

Do we drink rivers in disguise?

Do we touch the worry of storms,
the soil’s thirst?

Yes, all—we taste the sun,
we swallow blood of the vine’s
red planets sugaring
into the light years of our hunger.

We carry on
breathing the cloud in our lungs,
then the memory of the cloud.
And the barrels—
what are the barrels
but trees that escaped the fire?

In the wind, we burn and burn.

—Published by Five Points

They come a long way to reach us, the ideas of them first, microscopic.

Call it magic made of earth, a promise carried in a continuum: soil, water, xylem.

Purple births delivered beneath the feet of birds. New leaves fanned  

into shields—not to cover the body’s shame, because a body has none—

but a shield to shade the song waiting to be sung. Listen close,

you can hear them, the bowls of summer’s bronze bells. Each fruit

a sterling note, a ripened tongue, ringing down our throats.

—Published by West Branch