Butterfly

She returned half-shadow, throat cold-blue,

and her face molded by a morning star.

She returned in the maple's skew of light,

her white arms shrinking from the mist,

legs gathering at the hip, remote and pale.

Barefoot, standing behind the wall of her voice,

she talked imprint, moon arc, innumerable nights,

in the mouthless language of her body,

breathing like a candle collapsing,

nothing but a faint hiss to mark her unknown spoor.

"I am a flown butterfly," she said,

"and let that be enough for you."

And then a caterpillar crawled from her dark eye,

a caterpillar crawled up my chest toward the heart.

Address

Why a house?

A house is what we own,

where we live.

The world can include this house

or be everything but.

Anyone can knock on its door

but just us from the inside.

Why not camp in the great outdoors?

Or all of us bed down in the streets?

Why love of all the abstract, absurd,

of human emotions?

Reminds me of why a head?

A head is where I am.

The world can include this head

or be everything but.

Anybody can say, "Anyone home."

But only I can knock from the inside.

Going forward

The unvaried journey

contains times

when I need to lie down.

This is when

wild dreams move in,

and my constancy gives way

to the first thing

that bursts into my head.

These crazy inklings, ideas,

responses and marginal mayhem,

are making their way

into my waking life.

The unvaried journey

has lately shown

a penchant for variation.