Vast

Sometimes I come across a word I don't know:
storge, or galingale, or legerdemain
It isn't so surprising,
that in all the hundreds of thousands of words
I should encounter, from time to time,
the unfamiliar. 
More, that in the vast night
over the dark waves
we hear the flapping of a white sail
the timbre of a human voice
and find, always, somehow,
something to talk about

Star

Another long mile. You breathe;
the air is full of dust, the moon
achingly round.
All the words that once seemed important
are now gone, like the bitter
November leaves.
You yearn for the faraway light
of the nameless star
flickering in the dark sky,
both inviting
and devastatingly vast

Sleep

Sleep, now, in the midnight garden
under the shadeless winter trees
Sleep, now, to the whispered rhythm
of the frozen alabaster breeze
Sleep in the warmth of the amber fire
Sleep to the voice that drifts in from afar
Sleep, now, till the morning rises 
Sleep in the light of the silver star

The Imagined World

Sometimes you speak in a dream
And when I go to you
you cannot remember
what woke you:
a peculiar voice
a sound in the hall
or a burst of silver
in the darkness.
Sometimes I think you imagine
the world as it was before you
before us
a glimmer in the black sky
a distant memory
that returns each night
as you drift to sleep

Places We Have Never Been

We look at maps of places we have never been
sometimes in frustration, sometimes with regret
You--thinking, there is another country we will never see
now that we have children, now that we're no longer free
I suppose I tell you about such
and such person I know
who moved to Africa with two children
or took his son on a trek through the Himalayas
or his daughter to Bolivia.
But sometimes, I just watch from the hall
as you, your arms wrapped loosely around
your son's small body,
read to the light
of an illuminated globe
covered with names of places that, to him, are nothing
but the names of irregular, impossible shapes
and made-up mountain ranges,
and think:
this is a world you could never have imagined

Whisper

All the immediate noises die away.
Nothing left, then, but the low,
forceful rhythm
of a faraway orchestra
(a sudden parade)
so distant that you are not sure
if it is real or imagined
so that when, at last,
in the uncertain silence
you hear a whisper
it seems at once urgent and impossible
like a voice in a dream
deep and sonorous
speaking of things
that are lost
or have never been

Breath

Winter's long breath
settles along
the grey earth
in immaculate beads--
no longer water,
not yet snow:
a whisper