as a girl’s hair:
indoors, the new light bleaches
all his spread-out papers blank.
And a rain that begins
as dashes turns into periods:
“Es heißt ‘virga’ “, a stork
clacks from the loft.
Soon he can hear the roof
whine under the grainy weight,
see the land as far as the eye
can see take on a black gleam.
The postman knocks twice,
slides under the door a postcard
of Goethe’s spreading oak:
“I waited and waited.
Why did you not come?”
in a hand he doesn’t know,
and no return address.
Finisterre
Only the doggerel
of forgetting, bitten-off palatals
of Gaulish spat
out of baffled faces, crab-
crackle of carpals: it is
late; a whirring psalm salts itself
in between the embroiderd edges
of every scar combed across
the tableaux of unicorns and roses
massed on the endless
leveled lands behind. The sea
widens its blind eye. All
I want to know is
who sees this,
what has been hoped
asunder by wave after wave
of men in invisible ships?
Blood Orbits
(To Simone Weil)
Prayermower, periodic
comet.
Of the perennial verbs
nothing left
but the stalks. You keep one
step ahead, out-
traveling the snowline,
the interrogation cell,
the gnomon’s testscalpel.
You listen for silence
where the crowing calipers
browse on the zodiac.
You feed yourself
through the pummeled lips
one more night
First Flesh
Hand—terminal azimuth
hiving the new verbs of plenty:
cast, grasp, cup, rub between the fingers...
and so it is a pitched brightness,
part salt, part spilling, part
disappearance into some cut less
known than night which migrates
out of the pulsed breath that was
all you sensed of the other side
of the infinite margin.
Tenebrae
Hope-hours. A snowy hum
darkens through
the companionable chatter
hedging us off.
Poised heronlike above
the sense-rifts
your mouth zeros in on
a breath’s hesitation.
I lie with you
in the unquotable instant
before a vowel, kiss
you out of hunger.
Twinberry
Ravenblack. Gleaming.
To eat is to become
speechless,
as though you are caught
in the seahiss
between transmissions.
The blue jay fanning
his blackish headcrest,
the smell of an alder
catkin, a face you love,
dissolve in the twilit
sibilance of the same word.
Once, early Summer,
each of the yellow
tubular flowers was the paired
node of a new phrasing,
a tenuous, exact rendering
of promise. Once.
To eat is to fall
somewhere like the inside
of a stone, gray and amniotic. Seahiss.
Without end.
Seahiss engorging
the lungs of myth.
Winged
