Well within

Fire admits

pale moonlight

casts a shadow further out,

but spontaneous combustion,

is not a decision.

The ocean has a future,

returning the past to the dead.

I wanted to live and I said so.

(time unfolds the

wreckage of another day with

nothing accomplished

worth saving)

At night we count our fatal

assumptions,

make liquid promises

to know better, somehow,

the dark past seeping into the golden ground.

It never works.

So many things said

outside the narrow line of sanity

upon which our ideas

were once

so neatly deranged.

You through whom

a knife moves surely

have my face, my heart,

every passage has a lock

but not a single door opens.

The water of our thoughts

is deep but we will survive the truth.

Silence recognized doubt

and clothed in a garment of light

your eye saw

the open place

midstream

and told me to swim

in that direction.

Drowning is

only swimming without

remembering the air

between your bones.

It’s risky.

The world is filled with bones,

some of them yours,

scattered

in familiar pattern

in places

you once called home–-every one

well within the boundaries of

my heart--

but that was then.