Revery Poured Out Over the Final Day of the Year
I was told that its milky sap would burn my skin.
Instead, something like the blue fluid in flame
fell through the membrane.
Burn’s disguise.
I was told I was deaf, but in deafness
a sheeny metallic song.
And so on:
instead, but, rather.
Time warbles and warps past lore.
In the end, it’s all scent.
Is finitude over-sweet or woody with age?
I huffed its aromatic mist from my own throat.
Time washed it from my wrist before I could smell it.
Invasive Species Rhapsody
What we carry, fugitive, within us
sharpens its blade on us and
tiny bright shavings then fall
and proliferate.
Iron-bright creatures flourishing
in the frayed climate
of us.
Serrated seeds, species’ teeth,
slivered weeds, tufts of the spent
fur of prickling dis-ease
falling, furtive from the honed
thing. Sleek, toxic
ground glass of us
returns to us. How we
import ourselves as
versions, not even perversions,
as profusions, jaws biting
back at the razor’s jagged rim.
So falls the living, the irreducible
and efflorescing life that discloses
all we’ve carried, covert,
ceding as it reseeds
the swarming field.
Crossing
Time ails
in the grasp of this. Hiss
of water across the impassable
ocean. Gentle, fatal notion
who carries these
passengers in the moon’s
gravitational massage.
Endure, endear, endow
the wind-enameled waves.
Flax sail woven by
duration and longer than.
Enciphered message:
Passage. Who is the ‘we’
who fumble the
wind? Longer than
the sound of sky,
as long as it takes,
marriage of
lung to incipient air.
Tidal lair, harried—
Time’s transit over us,
seasick, the earth’s
invention of rhyme.
The Other Side of Extinction
is finitude. Exactly how many
bluebirds on the powerline.
In my hands I can measure
the amount of poison
that creates fertility. Sweet
scented particulate matter
carried away from the current
of the wildfire. How many
gusts, so many. But only
one spiraling current. Off shore
whales are spouting. With my
two eyes, I see three. There are
after all things that exceed
extinction. Strands of dog hair,
bindweed, the memory of those
who did not live to see even
this much, this less. I rip out
the plastic netting that anchored
another family’s lawn and the moles
in their gratitude, eat my plantings
from the root up. How abundant
are these intersections. It makes
the eyes sting, that smoke. I persist
in breathing it as a perfume.
A bitter taste that smells good.
The Sidelong World
Things taken from elsewhere are
deposited here. Animate things—
foliate, wet, and tined. An eye
that sees movement from
the periphery.
Each step
bifurcates the inanimate world.
Wings fret its stillness.
~
What foot feels soil rise between its
toes has lost the gift of
dividing the world.
“World”
by definition is whole. Its own
feet: webbed. Wholeness, then,
marked by refusal.
No peril. No predators,
only an ache. Only what the whole
can justify indirectly. An eye
that blinks back the feint
of movement with the discovery
of tears.
