Red Lights Featured Poet

I am awake tonight

not because of a bright moon

or lovesickness,

but mere insomnia—and you,

you would not care the reason

        Brevities #8, October 2003

        ~   ~   ~

warm summer night—

our first kiss

lingers long enough

for the lighthouse beam

to flash again

        ~   ~   ~

she tells me

I could reveal our pregnancy

to friends with a poem—

I tell her I’ve already

been writing them

        ~   ~   ~

The Second Eye: Five Tanka

our wrinkled newborn

sleeping in my arms—

how lucky is the sun

to have dawned

this very day

home from the hospital—

what are the chances

for the baby’s first drive

that all the lights

would be green?

grandparents arriving

from another country—

in the name-the-baby book

a four-leaf clover

marks his page

another feeding—

again we count

his fingers and toes

and they’re all

still there

the baby asleep

beside the Daruma doll—

tomorrow

we’ll paint

its second eye

she adjusts my blanket,

concerned that I not be cold,

and I scold her for waking me up—

the hurt look on her dark face

haunts me beyond morning

        Rivet #13, June 2005

        ~   ~   ~

April comes

and now you are gone,

you, who told your guardian angel

each year on your birthday,

not yet

        For Pat Shelley

        Hummingbird 9:3, March 1999

        ~   ~   ~

the leaf gone

but the imprint remains—

my heart as hard

as this concrete

after your suicide

        ~   ~   ~

I am at your door, knocking—

as I turn away

in a gathering rain

I wonder if you stand at my door,

knocking, knocking

        Poetry Kanto (Japan) #17, September 2001