.

      To be inside such

      opalescence,

      skin of milkglass, with inmost

      listening the bridge of evening

      and a child’s lost progress

      past us

      disquiets.

      Dreaming, her one foot

      leaving, we cling.

      We would air her

      nothingness

      among us, safe

      from the brightness,

      the pulsing,

      and the pocket of eggs

      seed

      deep in our teeth.

      Before the flickered windows,

      daily dirtying of [] pages,

      [] murmured words

      you’ve tried so hard to inherit.

      Myth

      She of the unwritten

      question, and he who plucked

      her lambent answers

      into hymn.

      Who’d twined her with a strummed

      thrumming and taught

      her tightening eyes how a self

      from all its hemmed-in skin,

      insistent listening,

      can unhinge.

      Now outside of her

      smallness,

      following.

      She owed him

      his hunger, the chance

      to diminish her.

      Or diminish from him, and to her

      some air,

      the sound that flows on the grey hills

      and gathers, alluvial in rooms.

      She was learning how to be

      limitless,

      a scented stain, a tarnish

      wandering, child

      wading for the first time eternal

      into the far glittering

      where light erases

      this instant and the bridge to get there.

      Even she did not know—

      if his bodied,

      from-all-the-four-corners need did not

      deceive him, if his gaze straightened

      and he made it back to the world he’d made

      her from—if she’d let herself be

      bargained,

      bodied—

      an empty

      aerie, wind among trees.

      Daphne Digging In

      Tarnish-scent

      of times

      skin

      felt tight

      and touch-shy,

      the many

      buds of my body ready

      to break

      under hot breath.

      Rustling, heat-steeping—

      this movement always

      outward

      so slow

      it can’t be seen.

      I could be swift as riverwater

      or still as ground,

      and yet the feeling

      that all my daily turnings

      were toward a center

      I could not cull,

      deeper into a self and a shell

      I’d always felt but not felt flesh.

      Pliant in the never-still,

      susurrus as a mind that stirs

      spent wings. How climbingly

      the heartwood fills.

      Can silence

      be heard inside

      such swayings,

      rapturous from a root? Bright,

      a high singing in extremities,

      taking me elastic,

      weightless,

      wider, the clearest

      chartreuse

      rinsing like a gaze.

      Adam’s Excuse

      Every plant poised

      at the point of its own

      opening—petals

      folded like mouse-ears

      downy and thinly fleshed,

      fruit hard with un-loosened juice,

      every animal’s eyes shallow

      with un-narrowed light—

      I remember the world

      was new but also

      unyielding. I started

      performing minor

      surgeries, testing

      how my teeth broke skin,