Prayers for Daniel

I think of you and each song is a prayer
a cloister of strings
that sing your secular hymns.
Just as holy, just as solemn.
As if Jesus Christ had touched off
from the earth, become a soft skyborne
silhouette, those rosy stigmata
painted sweetly on the faces
of low-rising clouds.

Your memory, god, your memory
your face, the precious intent
with which my eyes met yours
as if gazes could manifest all the words they meant,
as if subtle implication could become implicit indication
of that well in me, of that goddamn fire
that inferno consuming, and, in the months that follow,
the raking, slow embers of regret.

Skidmore

They gilded the underbrush,
those little flowers, odorlessly.
Below them, that gray, still beast
of a lake, hemmed in on all sides
by the imposing rise of the foothills.
Skirting the sharp-toothed hillside,
we dragged the outside edge of the lake,
clambering though brief snags of fruited bushes.
The water lapped weakly at our feet.
We seemed to conquer it, plodding violently
through it's impotent and unmoving sprawl.
Some ways down, we found a small sliver of shore, which cut
around the corner and made a beach of modest size.
Above it, those same flowers
cast a starless net of constellations.
The strand showed us the lake's secret:
that it was man-made, that it's fill
had been carved out and carted away.
The shore was a blood wound,
a scar in the land that wept perpetually
at its own defilement. Suddenly, the lake
took on another look. It was that of a show,
and all around us were players
on a ponderous stage; even those giants
in the distance, herding upwards
the creaseless draping of sky; those flowers,
tiny bright dancers pinned to their breast
as if nothing could escape possession,
as if nothing stood beyond claim.

Impressions of the District

Yes those mornings where the starless skies
Peel back grimily like a mouth,
toothless, unhinged, gumming the horizon and its
modest giants, the obelisk in its dim glory. The monuments.
The people, under them, scuttling. How does the past
have time to catch up to itself
when there are a hundred thousand makers here,
always making? It’s like there’s a history, but only one,
the only history we’ve ever had. Raise the ivory columns around it
and no one can get close enough to tell
whether or not it’s true.