Got one for you, straight from me. Fragile, filled with irony. I hope that you sincerely enjoy it, but recall gently that I revel in bitterness. My bitterness has so calmed over the years, until it has refined itself into a tender, molted thing, cradled and whispered, something nearly unlike bitterness. It has moved: it is no longer a thing of anger, of waspish hatred. It is a thing of quiet desperation, of slender doubts nursed beneath dark ceilings. This bitterness holds no blame or malice, only hesitant questions gliding toward a warm, answerless black. Human questions, not eternal questions. We all change.

The formatting will be, of course, all wrong. Blogger doesn't seem to know what the "Tab" key is for.

Eucalyptus finch,

tripping about in scalded air, the summer

crawling, the summer bawling turbid, rabid

with misty morning sweat, your black hair curled

against your forehead, tasting me.

The pasture’s tanked with the shades of slaughtered steers,

missing, skinned and burned

already fermenting in the hot steel belly of summer,

the tractors clambering bug-eyed over the

flesh of the fields, my fingers strung out

like pale naked bodies hung in your hair,

my mortal crown.

Your legs churned like origami wings

against the summer wind

rilling through the red canvas curtains

like rippling snakes—

pardon, that’s not what I want what

I came for, and I remain pale:

slumped in evening against

eucalyptus sad with hard, stirring summer

pungence,

rubbing dirty hands against my eyes.

The mares, slack-ribbed and used up,

too rutted for riding, whipping ratty tails,

your blonde hair straying behind brown ears,

the shore of your throat and the cathedral of your lips,

I cry like a paper samurai,

humid grasses teeming against my legs,

the eucalyptus sallying forth

for their shadow war

with bare fireflies, my lights in you.

Your radio begs for a single reprise,

the memory of a bruised Impala

shaking cans up your gravel to rest tinfully, tunefully,

with bleeding, whispering seats

before your ice-tea kitchen, your red canvas curtains

and your red hair stooped like cranes over the sink,

grins across the driveway, white through glass.

See, I remember.