The snow voids the distance of the road
and the first breath comes from the early morning
ghosts. The sparrows with their hard eyes
glisten in the difficult light. They preen
their feathers and chirp. It’ s as though they were one
voice talking to God.
Mornings are a sustained hymn
without the precision of faith. You’ ve turned the bag
filled with molding bread inside out and watch
the old crusts fall to the ice. What’ s left
The wind shakes the chimes
into the siding, and the dog shakes too
though he doesn’ t wake you
as I carry you to the bedroom. Small mouth
sipping breath, you are fish-strange,
bejeweled in the dimness of the microwave’ s
nightlight. As I turn my back to the bulb
I make your form in my arms a dark weight
but you are no anchor. Together
we are sloops trailing a tiny wake in the carpet.
In the dark it’ s hard to navigate the furniture
so I count distance — five paces
from the tile to the sofa. From the sofa,
Bangkok
Caught in a slip of particulars,
say, between the dirt road
and the brand-new
Seven-Eleven, a bucket
of lotus, three shades of red
in the mudbank giving way to
I can tell you, sweeping the several jigsaw lizards
away from your casket, away from their expert
invasions, kneeling by the order of our births
alongside the mother-of-pearl mosaics,
the family at your death keeps to form,
having to act out that love of endings.
There's a structure for idiocy — lamplight —
all over the nation; it's an illumination
with such sheer creative force it is misrecognized genius.
I have misunderstood people's duplicitous ways — their lightbulbs —
as righteous forms of complexity;
not calculated obfuscations.
Much like the voice in a poem that insists it sing
the most important seer of light.
Am I providing this luxury as well?
Or is this my radical assertion in order to
call into question what an aesthetic authority looks like?
And I didn't see that now you were here on the page
So much sky
Because we canbecause we can
a new kind, our new people
this is us now
we didn't know we were here
we don't know how it happened
we flew out of their arms.
Gregarious in hunger, a flock of twenty
turn circles like whorls of barbed wire,
no spot below flown over uncanvassed.
The closer to death the closer they come,
waiting on wings with keen impatient
perseverance, dark blades lying in wake
until age or wound has turned canter
into carcass or near enough for them
to swoop scrupulous in benediction,
land hissing, hopping, tearing, gorging.
no portion, save bone, too durable
to digest. What matters cannot remain.
My hair, voluminous from sleeping in
six different positions, redolent with your scent,
helps me recall that last night was indeed real,
that it's possible for a bedspread to spawn
a watershed in the membrane that keeps us
shut in our own skins, mute without pleasure,
that I didn't just dream you into being.
You fit like a fig in the thick of my tongue,
give my hands their one true purpose,
find in my shoulder a groove for your head.
In a clinch, you're clenched and I'm pinched,
we're spooned, forked, wrenched, lynched
Particulate as ash, new year's first snow falls
upon peaked roofs, car hoods, undulant hills,
in imitation of motion that moves the way
static cascades down screens when the cable
zaps out, persistent & granular with a flicker
of legibility that dissipates before it can be
interpolated into any succession of imagery.
One hour stretches sixty minutes into a field
of white flurry: hexagonal lattices of water
