Koalas Stream Like Bluebells In Oregon

The last time I saw you, we ate in the sun in a villa near the Ligurian sea.
You spoke of what you had been doing for the past month - which was little more than walking through the heat in Tuscany, over the interplanetary hills and fields - the mounds of endless clay that appear Jupiter-like from the farmlands and horses. cypress tress speculating the horizon, punctuating your tressles.


The last time we soaked in that hot tub at Esalen, staring at the ocean from the cliffs of the sur, the big sur,
I felt you moan in a way that I hadn't felt since we took off to the mountains back in '93 when we took off to avoid the mentality of diamonds,
the triangulation coordination of virulent koalas.

The last time we talked, you said you were going away, that we wouldn't see each other again for another twenty years at least, and by then we would have changed so much that we wouldn't recognize each other anymore, except by smell.


The last time we met you puked in the garden roses
telling me that they needed it,
that your voice, hoarse and filled with avarice, could stop the implementation of the caterpillar infestation that would otherwise subsume the entire forest canopy.

The last time we met you spoke too early of all the ways we would not talk again.

The last time we met you trembled beneath the firestorm, the lightning fields, the echoes of windy Kansas before dawn,
before the illuminating sunrise exploded like cracked eggs, half-cooked splattering the horizon and warming the turquoise underbelly of america.

The first time we met, you understood me like the first time we met.

The last time I saw you, I was feeling blue -
I had lost another job and didn't know when I would find one again -
they don't like old men in this industry, I told you, I believed, I sought

The time before the last time we spoke your best friend told me that she didn't want ever see me again -
that i consumed her friend -
that would be you -
and that she was taking off for the Catalinas for a month.
Well I told her I didn't think one could live in the Catalinas that long,
but she begged to differ,
she begged for what seemed like hours,
differing.

The time before the time before the time before the last time we spoke
I held a picture of you in a foldable gold picture frame, worn - i think.
I got it from when my grandma died and I went through her apartment.
The picture was old colors, bad prints, and showed you smiling in some dress that I forgot you used to love.
The flowers embroidered on the chest were indiscernible -
I think they were violet and shaped like bluebell tears.

The lasting impressions I had of the moment that you spoke
unfolded into my deep set eyes and your inverted nipples.
You had surgery when we were three - when before that your softness met my dullness.
When before before before that,
your softness absorbed me like koalas in the ocean,
drowning on their fear of understanding.

The time we slept in,
the time we ate,
we enshrouded you in-between your eyes.
The days we sought were too long for your absolution.
Your guilt derided my flame-outs and rejections.

The days before I saw you last, before you died
and I had no idea I would never see you again,
you trembled like a bundle of dried leaves barely molded to the branch ends.
The crunch was unmistakeable-
like koala wings in sunset,
like seventeen-year locusts smell the way they smell when they buzz slowly
in the late spring.
Like the way July smells near a waterfall in the mud,
hot and filled with bugs that don't stop like they should.

The first time we spoke - do you remember that?
The first time we spoke,
you told me about all the messages you forgot to answer,
and that you loved Thurman Munson more than
any other Yankee before time stopped.