like waking, even as it shortens. Dirt
inherits the leaves it fed.
Just as after harvesting, it’s good to cut things back to ground.
Kin to air all summer, your skin remembers separateness.
Limber all summer, your skin recalls contraction.
Much presents itself, absents itself—like family or
nerves shifting sequence—firing or frosting
or fluttering your fingers, your skin, leaves. Hinges all manifest in skin,
plain skin against the plain surface of shift—
quieting the way deer quiet before bending to feed. Air
rounds on us, carves us a cave to wear,
so wound about you—
too hungry for love,
unknowing what we knew, yet
voluptuary as eiderdowns,
weathering the bustle and turn,
xerosis of leaf and ground, then frost killing rot.
You can love your skin again because it requires you cover it,
zealous for keeping close.
Disorderly Abecedarian 2: Return
Fainting sky today pulls at
ground, trying to find color.
Why is saw blade made?
Zig-sag of teeth against
my grain, my gain, my rain, my rein.
Nailing words on trees in the forest, leaves
susurrate like pages, but can’t read for themselves.
Trembling upward, wing-over-wing, all the birds called home,
Halving the music, having it fly upward with them, they
bother the stratosphere with all warbling and winging—
quilling sky.
Xanthic eyes
pored over every memory of you. Poured myself. Poored my own memory
operating away from itself.
Kindling catches, but there’s no more wood for this fire. This fire
exacerbates the cold,
cakes itself all over these hands
until they’re not hands.
Re-enter. Something can be worked out.
Justification by feint, by faint, by fifth, by filth.
Love me past
& forward, but not now. Now I’m
demon for saw-teeth & nails
instead of words. When we were
younger we read poets, we were bright
versions of our jaundiced selves.
Xanthic (adj.) acidic yellow
Proper Abecedarian 2: Possibility
. . .& while everything else was rapt watching angels
bother the air with their wings—those
caked-on-lights’ glory/fire/stormwind: signifiers of not-
demon, surely-Other, surely-newsbringing, fear-
exacerbating (as if we didn’t tremble enough),
faint-faced, trumpet-voiced. While all that’s
ground-(maybe even water)-view, what shape messengers
halve the distance between birds (bats? bugs?) and heaven? What blasts “ANGEL!”
instead of WINGS? What intermediary
justification of bird’s being
kindles the awe of unwinged creatures
loosened from birth from the un-numinous surface?
My havoc, my hectic, my hamshackled harking: I’m
nailing questions on the innocent blue,
operating my own weighted machinery,
poring over the hagiographies, hoping for
quaver up the back of the neck; for
reentry of revelation or reverence to order:
“Susurrate the air, make liver, lungs, gut, heart
tremble recognizably.
Until tremble, until susurration, until quaver—some
version of supplication: think light into someone else’s hands.”
Why should the beasts of the air have need of angels? Their
xanthic eyes already see everything as they
zig-zag the air like feathers falling, like leaves, like messages falling.
Disorderly Abecedarian 3: Kenosis
Returning from church or the cliff-edge, she spread her arms.
Meanwhile, the others lay themselves down along the shore.
Perhaps selchies. Perhaps for every animal, there is a tribe who can remove their skins.
By their skinlessness, by their dreams, by furtiveness—
how they might be known.
Nay bloodworm, nor buzzard can know which of their sisters,
whether any of them chooses, whether each alive thing is
xylem in its soul—tough, fibrous, hard to cut
down, to be nourished by.
Love, some find themselves reaching out of their own skins,
each toward sentience, speech, walking, or longing to
gather
