Where your treasure is

Every morning the grey
sky like a chalkboard
effaced of color and sound,
the stony march down
rain-hued boulevards
speckled with canvas shopping
bags and broken umbrellas
snapping in the wind.
Every morning a whispered
litany of distant names,
love’s eponyms and chariots,
a landscape of quick
vowels and soft consonants.
Sibilate faces alight in the
trees. My hands become
shy, and cower in my pockets.

Every afternoon the rosy
light in her hair, a slip of sun
coming through the halituous
curtain and grazing our skin.
Pass the bakery, the railways,
the trees felled right on the
sidewalk, spindly brown fingers
reaching into the road and
snapping under cars. Pass the
prescient gaze of the faces I left
hanging in the branches.
Press their names to the roof
of my mouth and swallow down.

Every evening the moon
in her swollen turn; an eyelash,
a communion loaf, a plump fruit
you could pluck right out of the
sky and burst between your teeth.
Ask them if it’s dark where they
are. When they say Not yet,
ask for a photograph of dusk, its
complicated violets and rose,
aureate horizon complected with
slips of crimson and indigo.
What does it look like to you?
A shoe, a chariot, a silhouette
that stops below the shoulder,
vaporous body dissolved in sky.