Few more recently-- fairly recent poems.
This one is called "A Ghost."
The mirage I'd long thought forgotten
appears again in a half dark garden.
Those tartar cheekbones, the eye is a fire, the eyes
of some caught wild bird.
Something stirs among the tea roses.
It's her laughter.
The bowels of the locusts, shivering.
Later, I feel, just as in the old days, her fingers moving
across my skin.
They unleashed the barking cups, the obese spoons
with no handles, drums with tiny legs and leatherheaded sticks
tied in their hair.
Hieronymus Bosch, no doubt.
But chased again by that monstrous pact.
Sweaty.
Tongue-tied in gumboots.
I feel the cleft open in my forehead
and see the blood stained feathers piled at my feet.
Phantoms descended from spent art, hawks with April
in their beaks.
And that woman's dead now, who picked from the roses nothing
but their thorns.