DREAMWALK AND BOURBON

How beautifully you linger in the park of my memory,
in the strange land that is your absence.
How your fingertips as you stroll
touch lightly the leaves and petals of my fancies, and smear-mingle the multi-colored fragments of my desire.
How your feet skip and dance along pathways
which the holiness of our hours together
has mapped through the indifferent rubble of time.
How your toes curl around dust
and smooth pebbles and jagged stones
as we curled around the elusive axis of ourself.
Your knees are splashed by the fountain
and they burst open like desert flowers after rain.
Every step of yours is a blooming.
You pause for a prayerful while in the shadow
of each statue and monument,
and your eyes rewrite the inscriptions.
The gates to forbidden beyonds swing open as you approach,
and the rusty squeaking hinges
of children's swings begin to sing.
Sand explodes out of monstrous hourglasses
and fills a thousand boxes
for bright pails and shovels and laugh-damp diapers.
Squirrels become the furred offshoots of spasm,
and pools gaze hungrily into the sun with dilated eyes.
The grass writhes into mattresses,
and the trees thrust into symbol.