To ______ Poem by Michael Ó Domhnaill

Hours of contemplation, now subsumed
in cleansing warm flow
Are these my tears ______

Do I hide them to project this fractured image, my essence?
I walk this taut wire so that you won't glimpse these flaws in its frame…
The chasm dust of antechambers where I've been known to wait forever
These are the chambers the gulls fly to to weep concealed tears

When in someone's presence
one averages three epiphanies an hour
One want more
a need becomes dire
when one loves
one wants more
for hours ahead
hoped for

In those rare hours I string together
when I feel I'm not sleepwalking
when I launch above the waves
rather than barely float,
(The string of seabrine in uncrying dry eyes, jaded and worn by all these ebbs
And inconsequentialities-that is to say transitory companions of when you are not one)
When I am jagged and cleaved through, halved
yet rooted in unexpected and
Immutable ways to whatever sidewalk or barroom
Floor you are standing on, close by,

When I bleed from a core of coiled bedrock
become a burning liquid
more searing every moment
I can't touch you and in midst
of loving your eyes like a fanatic his phantom
or like I love an absence of the awarement
of THE absence:

Part of my inside killed and ripped still
warm from within by random
lovers and fickle libidos…


I'm sorry for this weight I carry
I only want to tell you I love your eyes,
and how your eyes and our conversations
Transfix me, and quench but feed a longing.

Something cries, the mist outside is
a settling haze of years. I'm thinking of you, momentarily happy,
writing a fractured narrative I hope affects you
a poor semblance of what I feel.
The mere semblance of sky won't cease the mist.

You are clear and beautiful
and I apologize for the direction
my miswill twists me
so that it's hard to tell you.

The moon, in mist
is a lost veil
a luminous soft veiling
The connection between us
unless treasured and protected
Is evanescent and fleeting