Nothing (you didn’t already know)

Some rationalize their lives
              as if that might tip the mirror
but I shave while looking into a
              photograph of Walt Whitman
sketching out the occasional parallel experience
              it’s chronological significance lost now
the same way time spins to the ground 30 years ago
(if I could remember that far back I wouldn’t admit it
              knee-deep in the raw damp serpentine
              of sea-mist dawn
                              where concluding slumber knocks
                              to open
                                                all that’s left
an instant so caught in a sip of breath
as would return my own redundant soul
              in a spare white world alongside
as though you lived there combing your long dark hair
              in the vague care of palm shadows, leaf shadow
night of the lunar eclipse
              doesn’t necessarily ring the velvet
                              Her heart tuned to underwater radio
                                                her watch set to Shangri-la
& that coral reef tango she did but only when the
              lights were off as tears recede in whispers
the way the shadow of a gull clings to the sand
              & though I cross the parking lot alone at dusk
when the wind strums bell-like guitar chords & the streets
haul-ass to El Paradiso
              my heart remembers thin watery shadows
somewhere far off flickering like tongues of flame