Leaves of Want 

Many nights I have spent

on benches by rivers. I have sensed 

the full January moon charging 

the waters before turning to her 

jasmine face to know it. I have seen the world 

open, which is a darkening 

at the suture, seen the veil lift to other veils. 

When I thought God was a portal I 

would fill the hours walking past doors

and gates and bridges, guided by the 

ruling system of spirals, it was 

a meandering absent of flow, it would  

will me to pass strangers and blow 

them kisses with no indication of my malice. 

And what was it? Devotion? Dominion? 

Decadence? What would any of us choose? 

Still I see no fault in indulging. My sweet tooth, 

or what I prefer to call “my sweetness,” 

is a recurring theme. My searching for 

authentic tastes—a peach, a mushroom, 

another fruiting body—lies with my being rote and 

my stifling of groans that escape. I think

God is a tree or wheel. I hold observation as practice

and solitude as a mechanism of necessity,  

filling my hours with words and 

silences and the thrills of this body, this 

exquisite separation. I shed my boots and coat and 

stand there at the open window so that my skin 

is peeled back and everything that wants 

to touch me can. At the invisible tug between 

my creatureliness and the other fragile, soft, 

liquid animals, in that distance I quiver. 

I observe and as such I contain 

purple flickers in the inundated storm drain, 

bursts of yellow leaves that fall 

like flights of finches into rivers, mountains 

of gravel beginning to bloom. Many nights in my mind

the moon rises on the water and I bend 

over my chair, stretch myself into this poem, wherein

I watch little waves fan out 

and collide and fan out and collide.