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Unaccounted-for Storm...69
Go back before the body []
who borrows your breath
[] and leaves you– []
before the dream of falling,
drowning, drifting—
dream of your life as you’ve lived it.
Deep Sea
What does the band
sound like in water
waking, the tempo a changing
wave that gathers and releases as it
fills? See, a doorknob
drifts down, and one by one the hundreds
of china cups upright
for how far, falling. Hours,
now everyone moves
gracefully; now we have some place
to put our dead. How many
pressures their bodies get used to,
the slender necks
of bottles, emerald, intact.
Without air, they hardly know
how wetly they’re under us,
how the verdigrised currents
churn sediment, cracking
watch-faces and tugging laces
loose. In the dream-
coursing that clogs ears,
the greeny-grey where
metal drips and ball-gowns
bloom, whatever wounds
they’ve acquired washed
white, skin-flaps
sealed like fishy lips.
Selenographia
Some of you is lodged,
must be,
somewhere between the sea
of serenity, or the lake of sleep,
or the marsh of sleep, or the sea.
Particles of solar wind, caught,
some whisker of skin fishings,
I don’t know.
I hope not
the sea of cold.
There was so little of you,
barely enough for the buried
crystalline drops we know now
are there, hardly
an ocean of storms.
Honestly,
I know there’s an eye
brightening even when its full
waning’s waned,
albedo of coal,
light of ice,
but I can’t feel it.
Fingers caught in the classroom
door’s heavy hinge, how your sound
tore through me,
knocking loose some stray ovum,
sea of crises, sea of fecundity,
risen and hovering,
not every sound keeps traveling,
some stay, like stoned gall,
bay of seething, straight through
to the bay of the center.
When that shriek descended
to the newly kaleidoscoped car,
many-faceted geodesic dome that propelled you
somewhere,
sea of rains, sea of vapors,
I was no known sea.
How the word
for indigo churning with its back to us means
noting all along at a certain distance.
Now complex eye.
Up there, the air’s so thin
it can’t be mimicked, even in our best vacuum.
Down here, it’s the weight of two boots
on my sternum. Must you
keep orbiting at this
mean distance?
What doesn’t descend,
shouldn’t. If I hadn’t heard
even some of the words, you wouldn’t.
_______ you _______ Kyle?
He was ________ in a car ________.
I won’t accept this moon illusion—
a thing’s not bigger riding the horizon.
There’s only so long I’ll let these
high
