Drunk on the Umbrian hills at dusk and drunk
On one pink cloud that stood beside the moon,
Drunk on the moon, a marble smile, and drunk,
Two young Americans, on one another,
Far from home and wanting this forever —
Who needed God? We had our bodies, bread,
And glasses of a raw, green, local wine,
And watched our Godless perfect darkness breed
Bashō, with your grass pillow, what underground sounds come into your dreams?
Do blue-horned beetles scratch against the starless night sky that lines your head
with the starless night skies of their own domed backs? Do centipedes trickle through?
Do worms burrow with their snouts, with their bodies that are entirely snouts?
Snoozer, I can only ask you this because now you are dead asleep:
Do I ever appear as a nightcrawler whispering in your ear?
Are the words, “I love you,” as soft as the cough of a good luck cricket?
The Poet:
Fugitive lung, prodigal intestine —
where’ s the pink crimp in my side
where they took you out?
The Octopus:
Another dead mare waits
in the shoals of some body
of water, waits to be burden,
borne into a foaming ocean,
where it might become food
for whales, or, simply empty
signifier — hair latched to the sea’ s undulation
like Absalom’ s beauty
caught in the playful branches
All winter we sat blind, I next to the girl
who loved her scabs, the blood shields
her head gave up, her face a sun of blank
amazement. She drew. This means love:
a circle with a line through it. More work:
a cross. More crosses. Ice sloughed
through fields. Ice river, the pages
A yarn ball and a hill
maintain an equipoise until
their neatness starts to bore the gods
of potential and energy
who hedge bets, reckoning the odds
of when the rest will be
I
In the beginning, a word, move;
then a plan and then the reasons,
which I do not remember exactly.
I remember clearly only the clothes
we were given for the journey
and the last, silent meal we ate.
We left the place as lightly as we
had come, so many years before.
And at the picnic table under the ancient elms,
one of my parents turned to me and said:
“We hope you end up here,”
where the shade relieves the light, where we sit
in some beneficence — and I felt the shape of the finite
after my ether life: the ratio, in all dappling,
of dark to bright; and yet how brief my stay would be
under the trees, because the voice I’ d heard
could not cradle me, could no longer keep me
in greenery; and I would have to say good-bye
again, make my way across the white
Rain commenced, and wind did.
A crippled ship slid ashore.
Our swimmer’ s limbs went heavy.
The sand had been flattened.
The primary dune, the secondary dune, both leveled.
The maritime forest, extracted.
Every yard of the shore was shocked with jellyfish.
The blue pillow of the man o’ war empty in the afterlight.
The threads of the jellyfish, spent.
Disaster weirdly neatened the beach.
We cultivated the debris field.
Castaway trash, our treasure.
Jewel box, spoon ring, sack of rock candy.
