How may we return to the bedroom, to verify | our love has taken place?

Catch the light | only in my eyes

Go by way of the path dotted with fallen pine cones

A dawn so sudden, even experienced old fishermen were caught by surprise, and God | glancing in a mirror, was still adjusting his tie

Kisses like sugar sprinkled on strawberries

Riding the loneliest horse over the ridge, the land’s | back broken in four places | no room in the atoms

And then a little | sugar spilled from the bowl | surely | much later | ants will come, foraging, sensing food

In a gallery, the brilliant male | plumage of the golden frame | flirts with the dowdy brown and grey | female of a Flemish | landscape, the muted | neutrals of a winter scene | in time | devour what holds them and move on, no | room in the atoms…

You | caught the sun

Wore those shades I always | loathed, too | film star, diva | disappeared into the | salt and smoke from | whence you came

One-way ticket to the future | mash the sweetness into | more sweetness

Spun the moment to a web of threads | each thread an instant | a fragment | a word

Virgin moments of those photographs | Park the car and cut the engine | Break the seal and bring the clouds of footsteps in | geese in their gaggles | angels with the wings of swans thrown in | with the lots of peacocks and macaws | too gorgeous

Left before dawn | Each immaculate moment | shrink-wrapped in the series and the memory and the wish | tilt them back and forth, then let them | leave the bedroom, go looking for a | better Eden

Ride over the next ridge, and then | the next | A land broken in five places | and then six

Left before dawn | Riding across Turkey when I was twenty | the hospitality I met | humbling, overwhelming | Lean forward, pat my horse’s neck | What I was looking for, I looked for alone, and when I found it | I understood | I would never find it again | Then came the others, and the maze of knowing and not | knowing

Left before dawn | I was left before dawn, lay ill for some time | A rough blanket of Persian design, a mystical country | Shouldering my rifle, I was bearded like a U-boat Kapitän | the blood | took a long time to form but | not so long to spill and run

When I woke | the world had died, a fertile death, I brought it | into me to show the grave | how it would rest, how its limbs | would be like my lover’s limbs, but the hair | would only be hers

Kisses, like sugar sprinkled on strawberries | Dying and rising, dying and rising | Embers of the fires of the mountain tribesmen, a way to live that could not be knowledge, down the trail of those kisses I went, and I found myself | here, my words a form of timidity, my poems | unable to get back to themselves, thrown | to the mercy of an electric city and the waiting mouths

Cold, and ever colder | Riding alone for hundreds of miles | everyone learns the trick of living | a ball rolling down a slope | putting one footstep next to another | Freezing on those nights in the hills | wrapped in a blanket | smoking crumbling cigarettes and hashish | trying to come to terms | with how to run out of things

Cold, and ever colder | Age wears the concepts, instills in each of them | the futility of their vanished purpose

Left a note | The dresser where the cuff-links lay | angled against each other like glitzy insects | the mirror | the dealer of | used cars

Drive into the next town, drive into the next | new town, and | drive out | drive on

When I fell ill, the world was flying before me | I hallucinated in my fever | perhaps what I saw there | was the truth, and the rest | an elaborate structure of misconceptions and lies?

Left before dawn | Long days in the saddle, chasing the future, but when I found it | of course | it was the past and I could never | reach it again

Left before dusk | Took a sleeper from Firenze

You | caught the sun

from the series bliss point | angels of disorder
(open-ended, 2012–present)