people will do
to each other.
The hole goes down and down.
It has many rooms
like graves and like graves
they are all connected.
Roots hang from the dirt
in craggy chandeliers.
It’s not clear
where the hole stops
beginning and where
it starts to end.
It’s warm and dark down there.
The passages multiply.
There are ballrooms.
There are dead ends.
The air smells of iron and
crushed flowers.
People will do anything.
They will cut the hands off children.
Children will do anything—
In the hole is everything.
I
Threshold Gods
I saw a bat in a dream and then later that week
I saw a real bat, crawling on its elbows
across the porch like a goblin.
It was early evening. I want to ask about death.
But first I want to ask about flying.
The swimmers talk quietly, standing waist-deep in the dark lake.
It’s time to come in but they keep talking quietly.
Above them, early bats driving low over the water.
From here the voices are undifferentiated.
The dark is full of purring moths.
Think of it—to navigate by adjustment, by the beauty
of adjustment. All those shifts and echoes.
The bats veer and dive. Their eyes are tiny golden fruits.
They capture the moths in their teeth.
Summer is ending. The orchard is carved with the names of girls.
Wind fingers the leaves softly, like torn clothes.
Remember, desire was the first creature
that flew from the crevice
back when the earth and the sky were pinned together
like two rocks.
Now, I open the screen door and there it is—
a leather change purse
moving across the floorboards.
But in the dream you were large and you opened
the translucent hide of your body
and you folded me
in your long arms. And held me for a while.
As a bat might hold a small, dying bat. As the lake
holds the night upside down in its mouth.
Rehearsal
Another morning, raw sun on the snow—
the snow melted back in places, exposing the yellow grass.
I almost forget what shame is, the birds
coming down from the trees onto the wet, releasing earth.
They take quick, strategic bites of it—what only they can see:
seeds, tiny husks of insects frozen to transparency.
Then they fly off all at once, a mysterious agreement.
The great event—has it already occurred? Or is it waiting
in the future and we are standing fragile in front of it?
Or is it now, today—the snow crawling imperceptibly back
from the grass, the sun burning a white hole in the sky?
Everything Is Restored
He swallows the last spoonful
of prunes, their soft rapture
in his mouth. Then the jar
is washed under play of light,
then the boy’s mouth
is wiped with a cloth.
He squalls for a moment, then
stops. Everything is restored.
Chime of spoon in the sink.
The boy is lifted out of his seat,
legs swimming in the slow
element. A small seal.
The kitchen ebbs and flows,
sleek afternoon sunshine.
Now the boy is placed
in his crib, now he is slipping
into the silvery minnows
of dreams, a disorder of shine,
particles of motion flickering
beneath the surface.
Harm will come. It’s the kind of knowledge
that ruptures and won’t
repair—an ocean that keeps
on breaking.
