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The Hesitant Hour

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Contents

Ordinary Magic...........................................................1Short History of the Pines...............................................5Ready....................................................................6No Laughing Matter.......................................................7Self-Portrait as Contemplation and Doubt.................................8The Undoing of Lingering Doubt...........................................9Object Reasoning.........................................................10Weathering the Stones....................................................11inbetween................................................................12Birds Then Silence.......................................................13Man on Fire..............................................................14Passive Resistance.......................................................15Talkback.................................................................17Among The Beautiful Illusions............................................19another story............................................................20Kimono...................................................................23Bumpless Route...........................................................24The Hesitant Hour........................................................25The Final Say............................................................26Garden Party.............................................................29CHANEL No 5..............................................................30Speechlessness...........................................................31Faith....................................................................32Lost.....................................................................33Checks and Balances......................................................34Folds....................................................................35She Was All These Things.................................................36Be-Bop A-Lula............................................................37End of Story.............................................................38Self-Portrait as Pain and Keeping........................................43Sea of Dreams............................................................46On the painting Dans la campagne by Henry Lerolle........................47Almost Happy.............................................................48Measuring Your Own Grave.................................................49Pull.....................................................................51Maybe....................................................................52Parting at a Wine Bar in Phoenix.........................................53"This is just the way it is, no nearer to the truth".....................54Deconstruction...........................................................55Extreme Makeover.........................................................56That Which Can Unwish Itself.............................................57Gravity..................................................................58Summer of 69.............................................................59The Strange Habits Poets Keep............................................63Not So Long Ago..........................................................65Recognizing Home by the Color of Rust....................................67irregardless.............................................................68Wanna Play?..............................................................70"I write this in lieu of touching you"...................................71The Origins of the World.................................................72There Are Stars..........................................................73I Don't Ask Why..........................................................74The Waiting Chair........................................................75"I'm never sure what is or is not".......................................76The Burning..............................................................78Waterfalls...............................................................79The Tulip Poem...........................................................80Never Too Late...........................................................81The Singularity of Desire................................................83Whisper..................................................................85afterword................................................................87

Chapter One

What stories were le untold? I returned home and stood for a long time looking out the window,

watching the fog roll in across the meadow, watching the light change to blue, deepening gently: a woman inside my head calling my return.

Ready

Every now and then I become self-loathing trying to close the gap, moving within that inaccessible given.

There isn't much I don't want to try but seldom do I finish much - living in the unknown.

Why is it that the winds a en some of the sea grass while others bend gently, as if forgiven?

I do not know about the mechanics of such seductions, how one moves from summer to fall in a different time zone without disassembly,

when intent meets reality, fulfilled at last: after-shocks of passion, geometric bliss.

I always wanted my poetry to finger her in my absence, to hear her cries of ecstasy across the emptiness, calling me.

And the perfume of my salvation that that might draw me back once again - I am ready for it now.

No Laughing Matter

Shadows stretch across the floor, waiting, it's a lonesome pastime, better left to sailors' wives.

Did you to hear the sparrow's song calling from the tall grass?

It's raining again. Seeping through the crack in the window pane, forming black coffee colored stains on the freshly painted sill.

Like the scoop of an oar, part of you pours out of me. The sound of frost covered grass as you walk out from the house, almost daybreak.

I am still unsure whether your talk is an invitation to action or a substitute for it. And I'm feeling like Florentino in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera.

More coffee, vapors, surface refractions, searching for a sign, a likeness of you. The last song plays, silence.

More silence.

The coffee is cold now, and I fail to see the humor in it, but then ...

it's no laughing matter.

Self-Portrait as Contemplation and Doubt

Every morning I stare into my coffee and see my own reflection, and alone into its depths my soul wanders, separating from the near to become the far,

to make me want you more, here, where the morning air still chills, tenderly,

to see your form sleeping under the sheets of doubt, until you lift them an invite me in to warm you,

wanting something that is not something else.

The Undoing of Lingering Doubt

We're not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be. - C.S. Lewis

And the undoing works out its implications...