as with this one,
I wake to my roommate bent over my bed,
wrapped in his sheets, whispering,
You’re only half-here,
I pretend it doesn’t wreck me,
that I don’t wonder all day where the other half went.
In the sun’s mouth, where for years I pissed heaven?
In the arithmetic of things I was never able to say?
What’s the point?
What’s lost isn’t dead until it’s found.
The river ice is breaking up,
smokewhite glass washing over the voiceless stones,
and I can’t help but take it personally.
Some nights, a whale song.
I’m halfway here and it’s almost too much.
CLEAN DAYS IN OXYANA
You ask what facts I remember from the last five years,
but facts have nothing to do with memory.
When I do think back, I always see the five
buck heads over Crockett’s bar, their racks
like the hands of saints upturned and open
to receive the next havoc—how calm
they’re made to look after terror, fur still
as infants’ sleep. I always thought
one of them must have wanted it, if only
a little, the end—an orange star blooming
between the elms, sound too slow to hear,
unsurprised at the wound’s speed,
its determination, like gravity—and the buck running
with the others, not from, but toward, or
into something I have almost seen. It couldn’t,
wouldn’t have looked away, as it can’t now,
its eyes the key to its lifelikeness, what you see
as black glass, I see as the absence of flesh
begetting the absence of light.
FOR KC AFTER LOSING HIS BROTHER
after Eduardo C. Corral
Before the rain the grass
stands straight like an ancient army.
Maybe a cat guts a rat
on the porch.
Listen.
The leaves turn themselves over to be beaten.
A split tree trunk
could be an escape
from the prison of growth
but a broken bone is never
the source of light we think it is.
Listen.
The valley sounds like it’s incinerating.
Hay bales
the silent heads of giants.
Choose.
The facts or the memory?
A sheet of rain
cuts over the hill.
A sheet of rain
cuts over the hill
like a knife across a lamb’s throat.
OXY 40
Think of the mason jar
we use to kill yellow jackets,
the way it’s sealed upside down
over the nest’s grassy mouth,
how it thrums and pings with desperation,
hundreds throwing themselves
against the light, little empire
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