as hummingbird skulls. Having come to the trailhead, I crave a speechless place caught up in a gold net.
Grit in my teeth and the sky about to tear, I peer into the cleft two boulders make. Eye to the dark, I hear impossible water. I am learning to allow for visions. The cliffs give up a sound like howling, which merges with actual howling to become a system of enormous potential. A lightninged thicket; a road sliced out of winter; a tooth buried in the bark of a tree; a bowl of lathed yew; a ewe split like a peach but still bleating. I walk and walk. Like a jellyfish or annunciation, the heliodore-yellow underlying everything shimmers, is gone.
Often when I wake the furniture’s slightly haloed, sleeping pill screwing with the visual cortex, a pleasant holiness. I believe he went home with her smell on his fingers; I believe that on the trail are many handsome dogs. The acedia hums and hums. Soon, excess and magnolia, snow in the mountains moving toward us as runoff, great volumes of water pulled into the valley, swans on the riverbank drinking that snow. I will sit by the trail until my head stops hurting. I will try not to be afraid.
THE NIGHT GROVE
The torturer wants to know
how one minute blood, one minute
snow. She wants the windows
closed. The draft. Light breaks
across his back.
She lets the torturer put his head in her hands.
Tells him about Flanders,
the speaking dead.
We are the Dead, they say.
Where snow falls
in the taxonomy of the greater and lesser
desires: it falls on the taxonomy. On the money
and on the torso. On the fur.
She tells the torturer:
first, for practice, they bayonetted
straw men. Missing their villages, winter
descending. And then
the soft flesh of stomachs
attached to bodies
tied to trees.
He says,
that is a very ancient story.
She says, Simon Peter stirred the fire. There
in his animal body.
Yes, he says. Breath milk-warm
on her neck.
She says, maybe this weekend
we could flay the flesh from your back.
When she takes him inside
and through her body, what
is expiated? Nothing
is expiated. She tells him
of the torturer’s horse.
He says: I was the horse and
I was his rider. She says:
and you were the body
quartered behind.
She says, some boys on the news
shot a swan.
She says, maybe you could start a book club
where you read about faith
systems. He stacks coins
on her belly
until it’s difficult to breathe.
Gethsemane was more than
a garden, she says. People that night
dreamt of you. He
is weeping again but also
erect again.
She says, the dead swan. Their
daddy’s rifle. Wings
eight feet wide.
“The way fear looks like anger in the animal’s
dark eye”
is one way to narrativize
the universe.
Go ahead, he says.
Why not.
She says, or maybe you could start a support group
where horses ride over
your bodies. Those who survive
get to attend the next meeting.
She twirls the hair on his stomach.
The way freezing persons recollect the snow is
they’re sitting in the motherfucking snow, the snow
is in their mouths and their eyes
are sealed by crystals.
What, then, of outliving?
Poppies are the flower of forgetting.
The old men outside the grocery store
pin one to his lapel.
She says, I want to hold those boys
close, and then
I want to shatter their finger bones.
See, he says?
RIVER WALK
When the other world enters this one, she hears a little click. Day damp with the breath of other animals, hyperarousal of air on skin, everything yes and eyes and windows—
