They Said the Smallest Wooden Horse Was Dead in Your Costume
gone unnoticed the inevitable protagonists accrue
fragile centipede working rot into unreliable endnotes
a storm, cicadas, ribbons of smoke above the river
somewhere else a war
light falls as usual
& the hour fails to be episodic
in the most expensive suit I’ve ever worn
A Point of View apart from a Personal Embrace
watching the unfolding of an envelope
a red thread from a felt purse
landscape pulled in increments
or another anchor to architecture love
to the voiceover of someone older
if this desire for narrative outweighed
our unwillingness to concede an end
To Map the Wearing Away of Things
what endows an anecdote with so much tinder
a particular tree in how light fell
how human nouns what the nucleus of commerce won’t replicate
the world in a real enough window
money made of money a bare ankle
pacing from the vault to the podium
to fasten the world a believable cape
The Forest Burns into Later Time
all that I saw from the balcony
an evening’s warranted fiction yoked
little lamb that gathers & gathers against a half-eaten idea
I’m writing from the weather
inside a dictionary of difficult words
details solidify with each retelling
but someone coughs & the theater caves in
Nothing under the Stones but the Story of Lifting
in one scene we stood on a bridge
watching boats catch in their sails late wedges of light
there was grace, ease a hero’s mask assembled
from an hour’s background music
our inclination to trail a supposed mother toward the concrete
a crow calls out its lineage in a single note
a surrogate thorn an imperfect Xerox
A Due Measure of Duration
already dusk bringing a different feeling
to the scuttle of leaves, billboards outlining the city
outliving directives in a little book of prayers
a cue to place the pencil down & wait
for the refrain to repeat itself
somehow we sustain history
one hand making a fist, two a steeple
One Event Collapse into Another’s Unsaid
an evening worn on the locality of thinking
imagined as a tactile day-moon
unanchored as I am
by letters, books, creased sheet music
cicadas’ shells lodged between lengths of sawed lumber
the public they, gloved in expectancy
O sweet Rashomon, it is thick & manageable & perpetual
It Was Raining near Dusk & I Was Still Reading
from a window painted shut to a woodcut
of the player’s fingers nailed to a flute
beautiful as laugh tracks alone with our wallets
I’d call you uncomfortable in dress shoes
while the night comes undone waiting
still there is lightning & inevitable rot
the pronoun’s shadow—its dark lake
Simple as a Wall Painted Blue
scaled from sovereignty to ethos
the logic of a button worn from overuse
I’d change my shirt to say “story of the day”
like a coin that previously fit the slot no longer deserving
another city’s disorder or the bird’s moronic circles
evolving a gentle etymology of sky
memory handles what comes to sister missing
Figuration in Conflict with an Afternoon
whose you is a whisper all verb
whose you a child’s hair in flames
whose you is replacing a curtain
whose you is thickening the mortar
whose you imprinting a beating heart
whose you aged a flower
who found it dried in the center of a book
An Approximation of the Actual Letter
I died in a book
& couldn’t touch the ink around me
it was autumn
I died in a book asking
the word for leaf for leave
I died in a book on the eve of music
in the distance, another distance
If There Is Always a Room’s Reversal of Events
a painted over presence from ear to understanding
what won’t wash in the agreed upon outcome
of a stand-in for our refusal of silhouettes
spilling momentous into scenery
a still life not so gone to greener pastures
that I can’t forgive myself an afternoon
unlocked unbroken untangled unaired