i
i don’t know why you keep coming to see me
i never asked you to; i never knew you.
but you drive so far in whatever weather
just to hope the sun shines down on me
and you can see it. and do what?
what do you do when you go back to your
hard old life? you open your mouth to
people who never understood you anyway
and said you drove three hundred miles to
me up and down monterey mountain to glimpse
me as you always do
late in the afternoon.
i will tell you what it would take to impress
me. come and see me on a january night in
a new moon when the sky is shut up in
fire retardant and the air is like shrapnel.
come and see me without wearing a wire,
come and see me naked in winter.
come and see what it is here when the light
isn’t just so. sit down where a rattlesnake will
bite you on your ass and tell me whether
you would like to stay. don’t tell me the
secrets tourists tell after a few swigs
of the home brew: i want to know what
you can barely say alone. things
you haven’t said yet to yourself.
ii
this is what you said back to me:
you said you could not impress me.
you said you would always be wearing a
wire, you said you could neither leave
nor stay, you said i have transfixed you
in the sense of impalement.
you said you would gladly wait naked with me
until the sun makes no winters anymore
but will not trouble me after the first decades
of your death, once the visits stop and the land
heals and the snow comes and my sugar water
starts to flow with your self. you want to
help me in that quiet way, which is all you can do.
iii
that’s what happens when you stay in one place
for as long as i have. people come up with all
kinds of words but they really can’t do much.
the voice that makes a hundred promises can
find a thousand ways to
slip the net; it’s all the tragedy of what you are. it
is hard for me to believe that the eden of people
is like the eden of trees, see,
because i just want to be weightless
and you want to land somewhere desperately;
it’s sad to say i think we’ll die apart.
