Thirteen: Cupboard Blues (My Baby's Going Away)

Tear paper into strips.
Boil them.

Pulp and re-fabricate
Yourself.

Red and black.
The blues.

Note lemon forsythia at your
Mother's front door.

Bend sticks into flowers like
a dancing stage (cage).

Send night jasmine.
Scent.

Into the quiet.
Day.

Cupboard Weather

I do not recall
So warm a March
So soon a Spring
So white the pear
So dry the air
So far the space between the stars
So long the time until I see you again

Perhaps yesterday's memory was the same
But I do not recall

Cupboard Weather: 12 Weeks:

the hot sun beats against walls
my face shielded by the brim of a blue fedora
not as blue as the sky over
the peeling red paint of the taco stand
which yesterday was a barbecue stand
and the day before that a seller of chicken or steak
but the necessary blue of a cattle ranch
of the Blessed Mother's mantle
or your eyes

Cupboard Weather: Already I've Lost Count

We've awoken this close 
to one another come morning

And these facing windows are open 
to the tickle and surge of Spring

Cupboard Weather: The Next Week: Unseasonable

unseasonable weather warm or icy

but magnified as through the microscope

a spark

an ice crystal

my empty heart

Cupboard Cousins

It was spitting and wet but I needed 
the walk up the small hill, past the Elks 
Lodge where the gates of the houses are
new, or they're scarred. Where the pink
flamingos are offset only by the white
swans in the otherwise bare yards.

And I wonder if I wasn't out walking
at the very same time as you setting
off for the cafe and me for a break from
the paper, flat envelope I'd accidentally
brought with me like a clipboard, like
a manila flag, as I leaned into the tiny 
incline toward this house I remember, 
remodeled and for sale and there 

one half of an antique green gate shutter 
stood staring back where the staircase like 
six layer adobe cake, called me to come in
out of the nearly invisible hailstone 
weather.

Cupboard Weather: 10: stride

I walked to the café
today it was too warm for the clothes I had
on though I was carrying
some you could say are overdressed and I could say
yes we all must be cautious and
prepare for the day that it's not
today