A 54-page chapbook of poems dealing with love and loss and the complexity of human relationships, with side trips into poetic musings on the nature of individual "beingness."AND I'LL MISS YOUI could smell the essence of autumn curled up in your hair as the nights began to lengthen and early evenings led us to quiet words about the days to come. We warmed our hands before the smoldering mesquite and murmured about what you would do while I was gone. You'll have fun, you said, and I'll miss you. But I knew you wouldn't. Ravens squabbled over something across the creek-bed, then took to the slate-blue sky in a raucous flurry of hugely dark wings. You will write, I said, and do little else, I suspect. Perhaps, you said. But we both knew it was true. You would write your poems and songs, and I would disappear from your life completely, while I grasped to hold your heart within mine. Silence speared through us, Excalibur returned to The Lady, and I realized that I was already gone from your autumn; I had already become an abstract puzzle of oddly shaped pieces in your mind-unworthy of the effort to solve. You'll miss me, I said, defiantly. You didn't turn to look. Yes, you said, still not looking. You'll have fun, you said again as though I hadn't heard. Your eyes reflected the glowing coals and a patch of just-bright-enough sky. And I'll miss you.CATCH MY BREATHCatch my breathAs it falls away from me To be washed against RocksBy the sea.You were always there, waiting, lipsupturned and expectant as you waitedfor me to fallinto your arms, the night silvered cherries on a bough, threaded by purple wishingsand wantonness.I was falling all the while, all of me, while I waited for you to catch my breathand hold it so thatI might yet breathe again within you.UNTETHERED KITEMy world has becomeno more thanthe ragged slapof paper on bamboo-a suddenly untethered kite high in transparent blue as it spins and catches on halting gusts of wind, tail twined into bowed string now deadly bonds, floating first askew, then trembled by unseen fists of capricious life, blowing me into the sea.