Love Song for a Queer Nation

Memories are pressing up to thickening light
floating when the moon sees our worlds end.
They bring back unfinished symphonies and at
Lands End a sea change under risen consciousness.

Get washed I beseech/ tell my blind handsome city.
Today I write my autograph on your red blood cells.
Your skies are plum-colored, your boats oar-less,
bobbing in the marmalade waves. Your Bayside harbor

has a stone in its mouth. Winds tear, disarrange clouds; rain sings
at noon in a pacific grove, a rainbow seeming both
truth and art. Wingless buzzing rises in grey fusion.
Spring winds sing a holocaust song, red love hymns for a

queer nation, yellow roses for so many dying becoming blue as
slowly the wingless rises, oyster-hued—old linoleum (littered, torn).
At night yourstrange heart is music learned in love, moon milk of
silence. America, ,San Francisco, where are your rites?

There is no incantation that can bring the moment back into patterns
we have seen too late. The time is short but some days never end.
Tomorrow never comes from waiting and there is no joyous lake.
There is no incantation to bend moments back we saw too late.

At your feet a deep-pile garnet rug are our children: they’re broken
bisque porcelain. I write my autograph on your red blood cells.
Once calf-white, your promise is memory tongued eggshell-thin, a
doomed diadem; our need desperate geography and a healing

love song for a queer nation.