For my baby

You move
from unidentified to recognized
unfamiliar to familiar
as you discover hands, I discover a seeking
as you breathe your unspoken complaints
I discover potency
strength to equal your tenderness;
unnamed infant
how like me you are,
loved but lost
found but undiscovered;
little child I've a blanket for you
a heart that's yours, now and always
and that, little girl
is all I own
a cradle poorly made,
a desire to learn.
Teacher,
who knows not that she informs
tell me things:
about innocence
it's fragrance and recovery,
about unconditional love,
about growing up
without losing your name,
tell me how your heart beats
how innocence throbs through veins,
breathe into me
the breezes of your baby existence
and cure me of the weariness
that has invaded and remains.  

[This was written on November 10, 2003, less than two months after my little girl was born]

Send me all (or nothing)

Send me a mountain

I will describe it

shape, size and shadow

the greens, the grey and brown

erasable with the blues of distance;

send me a river

I will in its colour and temperature

wash away my sins

and call forth

the lost archives

of all the love stories

that can never end;

send me your ocean too

and I will drown my resistance

in its rolling sheets;

send me nothing

and I will on thin air fly

and all my words and silences

to you surrender .

The sound of impossible love

When tropical sunlight 
meets moonlight's winter blush 
call it time-warp 
or time-zone curl
or misbegotten error 
of tectonic shift 
but it's not melting snow
nor the startled whimper
of surprised forests
not the rustle of surprised seasons, no
 it's really love 
unwrapping.