I am caught between another firmament
speak to me, xylem-bower
oh the vertical like death so majestic
suggestible/corruptible
now that everything is
a poem, unraveling—
the gorse the ferns the provisioning moss
collected as a sign water makes
when we dip into the well
*
crowded out our hearts emit pain-vesicles
that rouse us from sleep
Wachet auf
the smell of the shoal the smell
of the taste of that water
limping into the school
where the little boats are tied
in their polymer masks
*
everything so clear salt could touch it—
a school for time’s pitted mouth or month
I want to share it with my lover
the arum’s seasonal calefaction
wasted here unspilt, in lily-vault
*
remember when we lifted
the medicine from its blue casque
you couldn’t pay for it, then
I offered you credit now
my ledger is a new sky & you are, as they say
unavailable
to the pulse held back by its flesh-lanthorn
*
the dead, the sea the village, the donkey
: four bows
I prefer the storm against the apple’s
schist & twill
where once a gate, always a livid bruise
I was meant for this theft
& repair the contagious motes, as music’s
taut-drawn bow
*
temper the soul’s glass as a hunger-track
(& lift as waste)
striven’s fetal gurney I am “bereft”
in search of my broken psalm, succor me
at continent’s edge
I have never caught
this threshing garment’s immaculate music
*
a turn toward
the three-chamber’d heart, the colorless blood
I can’t even begin to know what “loss” is
(I who am lost)
the passion’s cyclorama envelops me
I am not pretending
to be anything I’m not (is the pity of it)
*
dwell in efference as a moon might genuflect
beneath the little
closet of faith
set the grand table with psalms
with pomegranates
—compel every guest
to some manner of being
*
what would you pay, to drink that milk
what would you harvest (& from what field)
would you be a face to the bees
attracted (as they are) by the color of
your hair, your vest your plaited eye
*
tamper with what music seconded
—the wind’s pale flag
wrapping the cello in its syllabic debt
yes I can
repair the ages
eternal around the bay’s plainchant
*
parliament-refuge
the guest debrides his solitude
(peeling away what the lightning prepared)
—the pilgrim press
incandescent hunger’s sine-hyphen
*
disappoint can’t tell how the story feels
(its severed intentions)
what the flag lends the book, & its army
propose a master plan
I played a minor fourth in the thorn-pageant
snarls of brush unpicked
from the lamb
quiver, in their continence
*
train the musical ear
to unhear the abetting spume None, & I
as Agent:
vary the blood
that thickens beneath the canning jar’s lid
o you little
sweet miracles of breath & motion
*
I am hardly in the world
anymore except as a name a photograph
friend, photograph
my helpless name
with each of your nine fingers
(common to bats & other mammals)
*
the green muscle of the bog lichens’ amplitude
sleeves
the fir’s bare bone
& could you like it,
prescience whispers
substituted for the canon’s impact algorithm
*
the little watches kept by the first daughters
anneal
our dwelling-stores
& therefore combustible
prescient in two nations
the past is tidal, I could attach to any surface
*
this is my way of being in the toleration-world
its apical bell
modulating the hives’ tick & splay
I want to endure my own
breath (alongside others’)
tapping into the prayerlight
strum the bay thick with baptism
*
my God, it feels
so strange to write from inside acceptance
of the organism
prose would have us
cry out (a sluice-like mercy)
touch me where the quince grows thickest
where the grebe lifts
indefinably from the surrender-grid
*
the humped middens burling with gray scows
clear into the commercial
flesh-clock beneath
a hiding-sky, meat- plaque
to my winter passage
warm ash in my beard
in the blue lesson
nothing be lost now but the grace of praise
*
witness the light witnessing
—depth & distance
the dead go on ensilvering the plate
& as if
we are surrounded by apothegm
you can’t ban the living from their dead
but neither can the sea
give up its evidence before its time
a justice-palace
inverted in the land’s moist jaw
*
I would lay my body down a naked dusk
build me a house
in which the wind may dwell
next to its birth- token, call it terror
or something yet more ungainly
the sea, miscast, anoints the perishable body
*
sedum-smell the outcropping
above the tidal bouquet
you are not a target,
she said (except when you are)
the banquet set out beneath the white pines
startled me
I was waiting, then, for night
*
I want an organ that speaks to science
in the sea’s voice
the bitter fruit floating to the surface
of the memory pool
stains my belly silent, like a tree’s growth
tined as a birch, & almost
indescribably absorbed
in the sky’s calcite lectern
*
through the eyelid’s lily-flesh
the red pulse inflects, not as verb
but as verb’s shadow, wake
nobody is “native” here
but on a highest ground
enlaced with precedent we approach
there is nothing in this world that does not
speak to some pale god
*
breath’s unpassioning antecedent
from which struck, flame
childless blinks upon
what is litany vs. what is /stutter/
a mosaic, stitched by weather
drying as salt on the forest’s sleek mensa
it may be a swallow that nests
in the corner of your eye
*
—char mixed with silver
the laughter is behind you
& your half-written name
o song o distal subsidence
something our bones met the mind’s
nerve-gill -calyx
percussive into the spectral hum