There was a green-eyed poet that I knew
who lived an entire continent away.
We exchanged e-mails, talked on ICQ
about her dying husband and the day
she'd be alone.  His bronchial cancer spread
throughout her house, beyond the garden wall
like an all-conquering mold of wretched red.
Too deaf to use the phone, she could still call
and type to me from an unheated room,
in winter, in New York, and I would spout
antic bloviations to bully her gloom. 
We later married before her son got out
of prison.  She wouldn't be happy until he did.
She'd had one husband and just the one kid.

As the salmon seeks its mother gravel
through the lying ions of the sea, I seek you.

Without your body my blankets are cold,
the ground hard, my joints uneasy. 

Apart, I am a mold for your bronze-- 
halved, discarded.  Do you know this hollow?

There is no shame in love.  Daily 
I embarrass myself, collar strangers, 

weary my children.  I am the ancient mariner 
condemned to speak of you wherever I go. 

Have you suffered this?  Who am I to compare us? 
You are smooth as agate, I am ripsawn wood. 

My heart seeks you like a cyclone. 
I would swallow your farmhouse whole.

Without you I am a one-handed magician 
cheating at solitaire, hoarding coppers. 

II

When will you come to me?  It is already late
and my father has closed the drapes.

I listen for your stride; I could never 
confuse it with another. 

Your back is strong as a barge,
your legs were sculpted in Greece, 

your hips formed in India, 
your face sought by Raphael. 

Your eyes threaten green lightning 
from the Atlantic.  You could crush me 

with a word, like a mussel at low tide. 
Why do I trust you so utterly?

This poem first appeared in  EZ Books Zine

Last Poem of my 45th Year

I thought of how a whale's white ribs 
could choke the sky's blue neck, 
massive vertebrae half-buried in sand, 

and how a keel cleaves the sea 
while wind zephyrs canvas to swell and propel 
the long black ship toward shore, 

heaven in a blue mussel shell, smooth 
as the firmament.  I believe there is a place 
for old men in the arms of their loves. 

Though Dante put Ulysses in the eighth circle 
for deception, both Gods and men, I think,
underrate his aching for Penelope.

II

Think of the beached skeleton again 
and the absence it creates, a neck of sky 
on which an ivory choker hangs, 

its central jewels composed of vertebrae 
that housed the church of marrow,
a metaphor for a core if there is one, 

something more necessary than defenses 
we erect to keep from crushing 
each other in the heart or head. 

III

A throat of clouds caught in the pincers 
of a whale's ribs recurs to me,
like a mead hall with the walls blown out. 

At the end of its open tunnel I see a dull sun 
stuck to the smoggy apron of the horizon.
Tomorrow Helios will drive his steeds over 

the brown San Bernadinos and down 
the cement-gray Los Angeles River, 
but my love's hair is silver and her eyes are green.

This poem first appeared in Stagger

About the Bracelet 

You sent me a silver bracelet. 
"Damn I'm good," it said. 
I found it heavy and constricting,
painful in its alien density.
I was forgetting 
how any restriction on my body
burns like handcuffs—
I don't wear a watch but you know this—
so I hung it from my keychain instead.
I like the heft of it there, 
I like to stretch my knuckles against its links 
and feel the ache of constant use relax. 

What if all the good people faded 
by subtle increments to stark transparency 
until no one could see them but themselves? 
Left to our sordid board games, 
would we even notice their absence? 

In this scenario, you'd disappear
before we ever met.  I'm glad to know you! . 
Whether this bracelet marks my wrist 
or merely jabbers with the keys, 
I am known to you as well: 

You saw the poor boy in the rich man's house. 
You clothed him in your sea-green light. 
You kissed him with your coral lips, 
sucked poison from his stonefish heart 
and smoothed the ragged seaweed from his brow 
with patient fingers, whispering, 
"You are loved, little boy, you are loved." 

Handfast

If I said I would disembowel myself in public
for one last benison from your sea-green eyes

or clean the Augean stables with a toothbrush 
to touch your white vase again, what does it mean? 

I plunge in the pool of your entelechy and find 
me mirrored inside the bubble of your belly laugh!

What does it mean to say, "Without you I am not," 
when I was here before you, and content?

You make me a blushing boy, an adolescent 
feigning diffidence while desperate for a kiss,

an old man begging forgiveness of his daughter.
I would be closer than the lace that ivys your hips, 

steal all your skin with my marauding tongue. 
It is a delicious irony, this blurring of borders 

between two so strong.  Would you rather 
we sat in citadels and sent ambassadors?

Apart 

You read me Eliot on your veranda,
your heels on my hips, silver-haired you,
sexy in Ann Margaret leotards, 
your hearing aid and glasses 
but superficial disincentives 
for the callow. 

I saw your tears held hostage 
to a day's work, your laughter 
tremulous and musical as a bamboo flute, 
your upturned Irish nose 
mocking my flat one 

Here, twenty floors above the traffic,
the distant pier lights cast wavering columns 
below the harbor's black mirror 
as if they rose glowing from the sea floor.

The fireworks are over, 
the boats gone home to slips, 
cocktails and network news, 
the usual decompression travel requires--
yet you are with me, though I'm 
eviscerated by your absence.

Your absence only wrecks my heart 
because you enlarged it. 
You stole my organs and packed them 
in jars a continent away, 
darkened all my gold by your eclipse. 

I clutch my great bouquet of years 
only to find the central rose missing. 
My warehouses weep but no one hears--
they live in the old part of town. 

The sun is never pitiless with you as shade;
I hide under the shadow of your rock.

We are as two points of a compass; 
there is no escape from our radius.

You are a mirror, like the law of God. 
If I turn away I forget who I am. 

Night closes like a purse seine about us,
but glittering fish, we slip through!

Blessed is the music of your words 
and the soundless world that bore them.

Never turn your pure light away
or I shall grow invisible. 
 

He has never been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, or The Paris Review, has never won a poetry contest and has no personal website.  Nevertheless he's  published over 500 pieces in the last five years and his faux cyberfame can be discovered through any search engine.  He's married to poet Kathleen Carbone Chaffin and blessed with three daughters and a stepson.  Although a SoCal native, he will soon be leaving to travel in the U.S. and abroad indefinitely.  email C. E. Chaffin