Desert Map
This is where the sand meets the
collapse / the flat line / cove
a silver or brown hole
a line that causes a fever
the shrapnel in my heel
my vast / his tooth
to my fang my fingertips cut
special knives cut out of time / more
purple / my own in my head
that hole with the never
be aqua whorl hole
may his low funeral
yours or mine I will not
say but for yes / that’s
true I direct the twelfth second
into you / or the math of it will just film down
you / in lines that confused be solved
for one / equation which was mine
or yours / or exactly sparse
the claw / the that
would explain my
pounding / in holes
where the shakes come through / could be
thawed or thrown over the
edge / into the sea what was once
edge but not anymore / as the sands
dip this way / just so you know how
I was once a sphere / spoken in the most different
breed / of seeds in my throat which I put there
which you did not
Now we are drooping to a nondescript flower
I
We tip back
our glasses to smell
the water that was there
the water that was faces
II
We count all the faces in silica
pressed into our bodies
nothing moving
(but for the water
he poured) Once
he showed us
his belly a river god swimming
around his feet Don’t see
the eventual dyad of rock
between us Oh me? I just saw
parsley, skull, one coin I could hold
another coin I couldn’t
hold
III
We carved his bed of marble we glazed his ilium with soil
we wished on his earring holes (what was looped
through is anyone’s guess)
IV
May we bite down
may our enzymes mutate
to ovals
like being born all over
again I address him
here
from the hairs of a star
seeping out a tangle of blue which I
undo and wind onto an even bluer
spindle,
edge of water
reduced
then settled into
V
Look at an alcove of marble then look again you’ll see a name
now blue now bluesilver and not ever,
my chylds, return home again
VI
a source
of being born there is no stopping
no returning from a father-folded
matrix: gentle oval
of body cut by triangles
which make us all roll in laughter,
in the echoes of which we sit
and shave while he begins
to spin
oh, the little things he says
Ziggurat
The head has antlers and a cut where something was removed,
a process you picture as you unravel the dressing,
picture it as handles you might grab onto and drive
away. How locked up do you think the skull was
when it could still shake, a peephole you catch yourself in
and see eyes through? A belly you reap for warm gold fleece
to throw over the tables of your home. Let’s say you live
on a ziggurat. You listen each morning for boots
ascending, sometimes a skid on the steps and through your grates
you see them, boots worn by the clubfooted, boots worn by
the swampers who suck at the quagmire, boots with spurs
that drag at the stone, cleaving a sound that balloons
up to you like a dump truck heaving by with a body
of dew, swallow of breath as it passes and leaves
in its wake a vapor, almond-scent—then a planet
pulled from underneath you. But no, you are
a baby viper, you are see-through, each morning the light
pours through and you say, come fuzzy vulture land on my head.
