Bouquet
When you’re away, I sleep on your side of the bed
and smell the sheets where the weave is richest
with your scent—bath-damp hair, armpits, feet,
the alchemic reminders of your sex.
Call me, won’t you? Call me what you will:
pillow-sniffer, linen-lecher, truffle-nosing swine,
or better yet, a drowsy drunk who smells
the empty bottle’s cork to tease the tongue
and taste again the flower in the wine.lShooting the Breeze
Aloof and aloft, the buzzards circled the farm,
and we would shoot at them, to no effect,
small guns popping, round after round.
Did we know better?
We were thirteen and had guns,
maybe small guns, but big enough, if we could only hit one,
to blow a hole in any bird that fed on carrion.
Still, we wondered
silently, how they rode the breeze forever,
as if sanctified.
Only later would I learn
about the great-winged vultures the long-gone pharaohs deified,
and even later, Dante’s circling song to death,
how it undoes so many,
and from a P-3's vantage point,
watch Beirut burn and learn at last, I too was charmed,
flying circles, like an icon.
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