we broke up
it was as if the last egg in the house
got dropped on the broken floor.
This world is everywhere! the woman said,
You won't go unsampled!
So many secrets
So many secrets
held you in their glass
Fear
like a green glass
on the shelf
It hurt like glass
It hurt like self
Eleventh Brother
one arm still a swan's wing
The worst had happened before: love—before
I knew it was mine—
turned into a wild
swan and flew
across the rough water
Outsider seedword
until I die
I will be open to you as an egg
speechless red
Once in the nights
Once in the nights
I raced through fast
snow to drink life
from a shoe
what I thought
was wrong with me with you
was not wrong
now
gates in the dark at thy name hinge
Under the gold
Under the gold and chalk and brick, beside
the rowers on the river,
the black lines lived around my crayon bones.
One line. And then my heart shut down,
even so, inside the lines. I rode
out of the sorrowfence blue
twine-tied gate
into the river grass…
The Windows
Funeral dream
“We'll put them all down in the great book of sleep.”
“You may be dead but
Don't stop loving me.”
In memory
“Don't hold yourself cheap.”
All the windows came to him in tears.
The chestnut tree by the North River. Its tears.
Dream A bricklayer. Your father.
Dream “If you shoot someone
I will walk out on the ocean floor
and throw the gun away.”
Dream “When I am of doubt…”
Dream “Go clear.”
Go Clear
Go clear he said
his high gray 19th c.
postmortem jaw
I loved it its high grayness
go clear no touch
but words no more
death fear
I swam out of the streaming ikon eyes
who loved me: not-me: no more care
I left the clothes
standing there I swam
into swarming projectless air
redemptionless
from under the earth to over the earth
air to not air
The Coin
While you were alive
and thought well of me
there was always a coin in my fish-mouth
off in the night
or the day lake. Now
the little coin doesn't need itself…
October morning
October morning—
sea lions barking
on the off-shore rock
Autumn evening—
seals' heads nosing through
the pink Pacific
I gather myself
onto my day raft, your voice
lost under me:
first other tongue
I heard my left hand
I heard my left hand love for my right hand
white through the screen door
just as through the summer elm you
two years ago in the bardo
moved into the room we once had feeling for.
In the evening
In the evening
I saw them
their little
open boats
carrying us
across the blood water
their invisible company
their invisible company
you beauty I never
did not know
no time
no place
you beauty
little ferryman
*
We cut the new day
We cut the new day
like a key:
betrayal:
We went ahead anyway
drinking down the will of the event
On the eighth floor
something fell
alive inside the old street wall
next to the bed
I heard it fall
and fall
Occurrence of White
First thriving, then failing to thrive:
no never thriving,
from the beginning,
the ghost freighter out of Fall River,
ghost railroad car out of Chicago,
raked my skin and your skin