Caravansary
The day is a landscape escaping
from the earth. Every day I moved away
from you, past walls of closed doors,
through colors charting the outskirts of a life.
Imagine all the doors cast open, all the other
strangers. Travel is how love pretends
to change. A new room unlike forgiveness,
unlike the soul. A scattering of uses
for escape. Every night the center changes,
hunkers down. A chamber like the heart—
with solid walls, transfusing starlight—
fills in for here, this bed without you.
California
It breaks apart into chasms and dry heat.
Freeways pierce the shore like detours to a holy site,
limned by money, tar, the scented gold
of grass and eucalyptus, cars and last resorts.
What is holier than a way to feel again,
even if by money we mean a last resort, or by beauty
we mean detour. Its inlands erupt with glaciers,
gold and avocados like bones jutting through skin,
and its skin is beauty felt as heat. Like canyon hawks,
the freeways hover over subdivisions,
and the mirror of the Pacific, gone cloudy and forgiving,
fragments endlessly from within.
