En Plein Air

blue:
you touch the sky and then my face.
an oil-paint thumbprint
that smears
instead of rubbing away.
i keep thinking
it can't be this way.
everything in me, every chromatic
molecule empties itself into that
river when it thinks of straight lines.
your craftsman hands designing:
roads, bus aisles, phone lines.
i touch that line beside your right eye
and then my own.
why can't we age like the moon;
in stages,
in waves that effect the shore,
in steaming blue hand-prints:
salve, vale, and everything in between.

yellow:
there is an absence in your
smile like only winter can explain.
the way the sudzy sun
drops into the ocean like a sponge
and is never seen again.
i am left with only the two gallon
difference of you,
home alone,
an evaporated mass of wishes and
the line around the scummy bathtub telling
me that one of us is afraid of drowning
and i know that
it is not me.
you brush your gums
fifty-seven times with baking soda
until your teeth abseil down by their roots
and you spit dark globs of blood;
I scrub my hands and scrub my hands
and run the wet over my head,
holding my arms out by the elbows
in that awkward stance of the sinner,
In that holy way I never learned.
Both of us preparing for a prayer
We cannot complete.
On the Wednesday, you leave a Pollock for me
to find,
there,
on the lonely tiles;
I press my hand to the steamy mirror,
to the weeping message
that says
"love me
love me
like i am asphalt
not meadow.”

green:
writing poems about you
like you are that gaseous pit the soviets
lit on fire four decades ago.
A burning sand filter,
fire-bringer, more like fire itself,
spontaneously combustive.
inferno.
infernal man.
noctis mors.
God,
for all intensive purposes, who
can play every instrument in the orchestra
but chooses not to. you,
who chooses to paint with oils
because oil-fires
cannot be put out with water,
blue.