Morning tides

To know the morning tide
is to sit silently
and feel partial detachment
get every vitriolic pigment of your body
and let it fall against the floor.

Ten stubs

The heavy droop of limp fingers
with nothing much to say -
like the cruel heads of dead flowers
with half-wilted stems -
like a burnt out fluorescent sign
winding down above the cross.
Ten stubs - pallid and weary,
like something broken
like disease.

She really doubted that any other institution was as satisfying and worthwhile place to spend time as that of the public library.

Glass-walled and dripping in quotations. The scent of the library, of thickly bound knowledge, was the smell of everything she wanted to become.

Intimacy

Sydney has never been very deft
in its handling of the seasonal shifts

always too moist
with clumsy, slow-moving hands.

sticky
wet

a very bad transition.

This time though, the air smells different
the creeping December invites delicate things,

the grazing of legs
as we climb your back fence -

the thrill of pool chair fumblings
in the morning's damp dark -

the surrendered, half-open mouth
disabled on the very first plunge

sticky
wet

slow moving hands.

HERE IS THE MIDDLE

OR HERE IS FURTHER THAN THE MIDDLE.

OR HERE IS NOT QUITE AT THE MIDDLE.

Ceramics

The type was neat. A good font.

"Today," it started off with - always beginning with today. It was as if (for him) these interactions were not a conversational mode of engagement, but a place for one-way divulgences, a dear diary online.

"Today," he had written, "I got to use the wheel again in ceramics, used it for the first time in a long time."

I pictured the wheel in his ceramics class, in the heartland of Midwest America. Was the wheel small and resting on a table? Or much larger, on the ground? I decided it was the kind of thing you straddled, thick and grey between your legs. After throwing a moist heap to the batter-board, you would sit on a plastic stool and bend downward as the damp, crystalline structure spun through half cupped palms. In that small town class, there would be four or five students. Sitting quietly. All spinning clay.

"It blew my mind, the wheel," he said. "I would like to show you how."

Later, I presumed, he would ready up a pencil end for incised decoration. Square sort of patterns - that was very Romanesque. He was a son of the classics, he was straight-laced schooling. Post-modernism or the post-post or the new way, was too far from these smooth clay forms, from the Romans and their Greek antecedents.

The talk between us was faded out, it was old news; it was dead. I wondered now, almost a full year past, if it was graduation season in Iowa, or if the ceramics classes were still on.