for my NB sweetheart: a ray of sunshine and a lather of spit.

Sprinkling the anger from your shoulder-bladed gold. Queen?
What's happened before us would bring drones from a crowd
if a crowd or tiara were here. How naughty the swing of a weapon
and pulses of air: diamonds engaging the lollipop swords,
saliva held in esteem, as understood as the slate steps of a Country Club,
Held? A reception whose blades you've sown (as though grass
through the tip of a unicorns' horn), yet you've taken more than you need
and written liqueur and lipstick on the same napkin -- what mingling sense
does the meadow procure from another field,
another square on the scorecard? Oh, you've wished,
how those bouncing gods would fulfill their own intended wings,
buffeting pores, sweat glistening amid a mountainous haze.
Tomorrow, they say, the clouds won't form
the spattering torrent of cliché, of rubrical muse
and storms that send us towards the nape of a refuge
primping the flowers that seal your fate: an evening in white, annuals pulled
from the sides of an aisle, blooms that know every sequence equals the equation
of a sphere, of words like four plus three. Fives.
Tables full of billiard balls colliding for those unnumbered guests.
Destiny believing they couldn't arrive, and Milosz translating a cure
for the whimsy of golf and Earthly Delight,
"how lightly they walk", how constant "the hands that march in early morning"
as if wresting the soul and the "onset of an another world".
Risk, they say, is a provision of Hell, is a border that drops
like the slumber of a remembered child, a white line, a stake that leans
beneath the paint. Only here, where things like reflection and mascara persist,
where the radiant face of imagination spares us
from entering the hazardous bliss, we wait for our tee time.

*** -- a poem taken from the edge of the seventh hole, for KA in BURLINGTON!