2/V.

V.

1.

I stand next to you anywhere like

the shadow of the sea in the blood

of Friday night so many moments with

nothing but water in common

you can kiss me

for free at any restaurant I am the aqueous

moon you this way and reel 

around the piazza

  your motions articulate with give and take

wet & urgent, like water, hot, from within

the eye, bubbled out from the hand, one sees

what is necessary, response is self-possession,

but not of yourself–

The line is a lifetime one can’t be held to more

I mean there’s only more I can’t be held

you want to be-hold, me– you are me,

want to be you again– I’ll do anything to feel you there. 

It’s the drama of my life where are you.

2.

You and me what a fabulous confusion

how easy it was to become strange again

the jostled excitement to bump a body 

in the crowded knowing by such-wise

inner-flesh not delineated, but animating

life of the crowd agitates

new land, atomic overflow

that is beauty’s decomposition, that nostalgic now

every moment’s planned obsolescence

the toothless, mouthless whisper

easy to become whole again

for a little

    it would be so simple

but that the giants, our mysterious mothers 

like a highschool dance are born suddenly between us.

The giants feel nothing but hover over and beyond us

the city of their youth we are their nostalgia

never let go your chips. But who cares about

giants, they can’t be felt, only you

o pedestrian o regular moonlight only you

can be, the actual hammer of the atomic

hammering. The giants bore us into love of each other.

The immense shadow of a touch opens its 

Brobdingnagian land within, where the so-called chips

with which you gamble and can never lose

lie strewn across the beach as far as you can see.

3.

It makes no sense, but that hardly matters now

don’t you dare call this a dream, and whoever she is

with the rags, with the bodiless voice and rippling

clothes– there’s a giantess who stalks

the land I describe when I don’t know what I’m talking about,

and I’m talkin' to you, sis, through the blessed contingencies

we call your wood. The solid stuff between the sea and her own undulations.

Between the waters and the deceitful rippling grass. 

The ring of flesh around the island we live on, 

call out to her. I’m not proselytizing, 

I mean that’s just what we do, the characters of her name.