Bernard Henrie

Our seventh date spills out, glorious!
We will dine with all New York
dashed against the sky,
eat big amidst the ambience
...

Scented with African Bird Peppers
and leaning in to a third afternoon, first month
of a recluse year, my neighbor looks on wistful
as an overweight high school girl.
...

Only I know how my heart feels,
to lose from the beginning
and gain slowly, to give away
with both hands.
...

Fallen dirty drunk onto a Greyhound bus,
a traveler stares into the conch shell
of a winter night and is is taken into
the hands of the deaf moon.
...

The white ash of day burns down,
dusk seeps across the Arabian Sea,
Mumbai shuts down before my eyes.
...

Scholarly bees who attend college and graduate with high marks
go to dewy clover fields wet enough to prevent a scalded mouth,
dull bees are sent to Cleveland, to my house, and others nearby
where the gardens are limp green, plants like washed dollar bills
...

I have quiet, nonchalant foibles
my Chinese wife doesn't like.

I walk around with
...

They walk out of magazines
and radio speakers, children
from Darfur's solemn bush,
little herons of the desert,
...

Rain streaks the casino windows
clean as a yellow tiger.

The croupier totals up
...

When she speaks Spanish
her lips are scented with jacaranda.
In the bath I see her convex belly
from childbirth and childbirth again.
...

Nothing much has changed
since our argument,
I live in the same sub-let room
I once shared with you.
...

I only prayed once, to come home from Vietnam
on time, no lost orders. My prayer was granted.

But I am not a good Catholic.
...

I exchange my bamboo fan for a Swaine Brigg
umbrella, Prince of Wales model.

the waiter nods off, the cook turns newspaper
...

I

Girl with peacock wings,
blue dusk over Kobe.

II

Murakami looks dead when he sleeps.
Birds at great distance circle behind
...

My mother was better looking than me,
hips efficient as a racing car.

Dalton China complexion, single strand
...

The canal stream is made of glass
and only birds break the water edge
to pose as though painted.
...

Hiroyoshi speaks quietly
of the girlfriend
he had four years ago;
she wore western clothes,
...

The parrot
is upside down and drunk
on three ounces of champagne.
...

Smiling smiling into a dozen youthful
afternoons,
sunlit once I suppose
in gold stained antiquity,
...

The black cars grim in the rain's steady drip,
the determination to carry father to his grave.
My father who hated cold water, downpours
and dreary afternoons without yellow sunlight,
...