Gabriel Safdie

at the rivermouth
 

we walked out the longest way

to sea   suddenly turned

 

we met the tide engulfing

hurrying inland over

 

rippling mounds of mud

quickening (as we were)

 

in rilling currents over

cockle beds ground

 

shellfish green and rust

seaweeds pulling shoreward

 

  a creamy foam frothed

swirling up our ankles    and

 

two empty crab shells afloat

rushing silently past
 

larval dream
 

i wish i

could lie with you

for the rest

of this life

all curled up

 

in a cocoon

 

then we could rise

as twin butterflies

to spend

one endless day

in the sun
 

journey to love
 

don't believe me when i tell you

i love you    for as my words devolve

 

they give no more reassurance than

their easy predecessors—also words

 

  yet stretched out as we are here

embracing on the sofa    remember when

 

just like now    through the open window

blew in on us that gust    how engulfing

 

was that glow of ethereal tongues    and we

naked    sipping our full red wine

 

meanwhile the tumultuous rose

stems crimson from the clear decanter

 

poised upon the laden white bookshelf

the air    subtly invaded by its scent

 

with thorns darting shivers down my spine

over which sings an egyptian diva

 

the strings played cleaving to her voice

just as the silk clings to your skin

 

while the room's become a drum's inside

to a beat tracing the longest journey

 

where love isn't made out of language

but from the intricacies of the route
 

woman and crane: graffito
 

on the vast wall

of a central service station

a stylized painting of

 

a naked woman

her arched body flung back

into an almost circle

 

to convey ecstasy

with her feet and hands

almost meeting to intimate

 

the sun with her glaring

yellow against morocco

blue    she faces a tow truck:

 

a colossal craned tip

erected to touching her

thighs' parted lips
 

in concert
 

the giggles and the scattered shrieks

rose with the crowd's reseating

  the eliciting intruder    a graceful bat

 

soon caught the shifting throng of heads

to and fro throughout the vast hall

and seeming not to seek a passage out

 

it looked content to glide about our midst

a veritable stranger to these parts

this blood relation    an atavistic mystery

 

from a nocturnal mythic past    to us

who greeted him with fear-tinged laughter

till someone's coat was flung to net him

 

then turn him out into the night

to wild applause as for a master's work ...

but even to the Brahms an echo hovered

 

a ghost accompaniment in web-winged flight

a memory batting through the soaring movements

before receding unto dim primeval lairs

 

inscape
 

a snow bound landscape

a sigh at a window

 

breath revealing

patterns on a pane

 

  two names

keep quickly disappearing

 

against the cold

on a bus pointing south

 

  now the snow

slowly diminishes    slowly

 

diminishing

toward a time

 

all will be gone

  while turning under me

 

ever unravelling

the curvature of your ground

 

still

travelling on