Yeats said, once, that
those who love are sad—
how bad had he had it?      Hardly.
 
We’re still drawing Jupiter 
milk from the sapphire
mornings and hematite
mugginess clung around
smoldering stock pots,
tickling jelly bean peppers,
vidalia schmaltz, and carrots,
recalling those hoodoos plucked 
from the bristling ribs of Vermilion Cliffs,
into velveteen soup sheen 
gods are compelled to but cut
into seventy layers of big top
filigreed uchikake, sporting a
bridal train as
wide as the Nile’s 
revered, and quintuply
ushering trees from the
chilblained sands we settle 
our tenuous soles in—soles
now nearly seamless. Boko-
 
maru ’til the kittens come 
home and the beckoning 
moon’s honed into a pendant. How
 
there were squeaking accordion
toy hammer otters and dogs bent
baying abreast of the palisades, cheese 
and olives and water-logged fingertips, 
penitent glances gaily ingrained in the
old Marseilles King of Cups cocked 
over a leaf-wracked plinth wrenched 
                                          up from the
                                          crick—how
the tarot cards flipped there follow us
                                             still—how
that caterpillar then
calmly expressed its 
pins that moment 
we kissed and that 
rash on your neck 
I was worried seemed 
maybe the more to you 
omen the more so than   
                          nacreous       auspice. Albeit,
                          auspice it was, and is, and—
 
Still, the Pagoda there shoulders our
dandier banner (in secret), the banter of
ground-score craft supplies that
Jesus (a man who went by 
Jesus or Noah or Noah was
waiting for Jesus or Jesus had
bicycled off to find Noah) had 
left lined up about benches trembling
still with that swell little Lennox song you’d 
just swanned out over the shadows on, singing, 
the language is leaving me evermore cleanly than
gilded gingkos summon the fluttering 
full of the yellow brick road bent 
into but tender eternity, dahlia-soft and 
                      frolicking                    far past
                       palisades,                        (how
                             peaks,                           we
  the Mucha-made eaves,                       had
  the Chagall-styled stained glass         known
           welcome signs that                      in 
           garnet and opal the                     lives
           sprawling acicular                      long
           spines of the ever                       past
           unwinding Emerald                  such
                          City’s vast,                    peace
                          cactus-fat,                    with
                          fly’s-eyed                     the
                          skyscrap                      tsetse
                          -ers, tap                       fly
                          -ering                          and
                          off in                           the
                         the                               un-
                     wake                               fet
                  of our                                tered
            giggling                                   sun
          wordplay.                                  rise)
  How you once
read to me Harpo Speaks, 
as Harpo couldn’t, bid ever 
devoutly the muted magician who
speaks in strictly illumining 
music—So, we too must speak in music, 
music, Vonnegut’s almost inviolate 
            proof of God—and, so
            my proof of God then, too,
            is the two of us speaking 
            in lucid and luminous
                       music.
                               i could go on for
                 unraveling hours on how
      our soles should seem so 
                                 seamless, now; though
 
you, of course, already drew it
in crystallized chalk rooted 
deep in the rock of that
coffee shop, still tucked
like an opal
perennial:
                 you and me
                   seesawing
      over the creamiest
      sea in a teacup,
          summoning something,
            something akin to the
        verve of a cream-stirred
                   Jupiter nervously
                           hoping it just,
               if it should just smirk
         a bit broader than smirks
         should allow or simply insist, 
                                        live up to 
        what’s
meant by being 
 
      a good Jupiterian, simply
      a good Jupiterian, 
 
        ever and always, almost
        secretly simpering sole
        to sole and nose to nose and
 
Zeus only knows just where we’re split.