The Mighty River's Tale I

This is a riverine tale

Sailing on a boatman's barge

Floating, for our envious eyes to see.

Two faces, held forever in a frieze

Their gaze

Intersects, refract

At odd angles.

She laughs in abandon

Like so many ripples on a mighty river,

His face catches the sun on her waves.

A youth never ours,

This freedom 

Of a moment under the sun

Spent carefree.

A delicate haiku of desire,
The symmetry of curved bodies
Intertwined in a perfect sphere

Ekphrasis I

Curious impatience

And the to and fro

Of roiling waters.

A blue sky

Stoops to kiss

The waves,

Dashed to crystals

Against stoic age-old hills.

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To Faraway Friends

Sharing lives and toothbrushes

Prepare, to be strangers yet!

To pass by in the street perhaps

Muttering other names

Rushing to homes elsewhere

Inhabiting other beds, other worlds

Carrying names, not our own

Like foreign coins

Jingling in these home pockets.

While this ancient city

Knocks the door

Of those new lives.

And we’ll measure distance anew—

A little further perhaps than

Today,

When you lie,

Half a pillow away.

This guilt offers no getaways,

No spiral path to re-trace,

A walk back to a beginning,

To un-knot the middle

Of a fixed telos set in wet cement.

Except perhaps, a forever of

Slow regret seeping through

The crevices of days.

Book-ways

This landscape of memory,

And the portrait of one

Posing forever, frozen

In some sepia world;

The margins cleared

Of remembered words,

A text of desire paginated

Into an easy understanding

Of the wise ways of the world

Hard-bound now against

The despoiling of time;

Crisp pages, each

Chaptering new moments

Whirled in continuum

Of infinite whiteness

And traces of ink

Scribbling away

New lines on old die-hard tales.