cell,
the gnomon’s testscalpel.
You listen for silence
where the crowing calipers
browse on the zodiac.
You feed yourself
through the pummeled lips
one more night
First Flesh
Hand—terminal azimuth
hiving the new verbs of plenty:
cast, grasp, cup, rub between the fingers...
and so it is a pitched brightness,
part salt, part spilling, part
disappearance into some cut less
known than night which migrates
out of the pulsed breath that was
all you sensed of the other side
of the infinite margin.
Tenebrae
Hope-hours. A snowy hum
darkens through
the companionable chatter
hedging us off.
Poised heronlike above
the sense-rifts
your mouth zeros in on
a breath’s hesitation.
I lie with you
in the unquotable instant
before a vowel, kiss
you out of hunger.
Twinberry
Ravenblack. Gleaming.
To eat is to become
speechless,
as though you are caught
in the seahiss
between transmissions.
The blue jay fanning
his blackish headcrest,
the smell of an alder
catkin, a face you love,
dissolve in the twilit
sibilance of the same word.
Once, early Summer,
each of the yellow
tubular flowers was the paired
node of a new phrasing,
a tenuous, exact rendering
of promise. Once.
To eat is to fall
somewhere like the inside
of a stone, gray and amniotic. Seahiss.
Without end.
Seahiss engorging
the lungs of myth.
Winged Book
(for Sandra Landers )
From somewhere beyond
the roiling origins of bone
and need, where all the oldest
hurts and breakages
root determinedly,
you wedge a blade of flame
in the impossibly thin
season between words: This,
then, how blessing can enter
the tumult of our days’ lost
answers to hearts that plunge
along an arc of senseless
pain; this then how flight
is possible again beyond
reason, how blue exclamations
leap into joy, praise.
Figures and Grounds
1. Vendémiare
What begins as your heart wanting
to be heard
out, finally, beyond all
capricious arrayals
proves the devil to redo:
you step into the street
and find
you’ve accomplished
a kind of bolero over and above
the specific blessings
of freedom (search, seizure,
silencing, etc.) that coagulate
into magnets for good
sense, boutique art.
The other year, you unlocked,
let’s say, some old alchemical emblem-
book, its tendons rubbed
raw by innumerable pressings, and you
couldn’t resist adding
a pinch of your own dirt,
smartening it up
for the next performance
of Vive L’Humanité.
And what is it you see
in the other focus
of your elliptical flight
back from the republic of afar?
A well-appointed loft
in the fourteenth arrondissement,
a wife swallowing a sabre,
and taciturn daughters
with gold nipple-piercings,
lavish Ukiyo-e tattoos.
2. Brumaire
The storm discovers
its voice, and the meanings
multiply gust by gust.
It all becomes
a city of one dream. Think
of sleep as a fire
whose blown white heat
brings out layer
after smudged layer
of sentences
quilled in citron inks,
book chapters, perhaps.
The lucky salvage
fistfuls of smoke, pen
them away inside
the orbital cavities
sunk in lovely skulls. So many
eyes the color of parchment
perching like pigeons
on spires, on ramparts,
so many chilling nights
of hilarious weeping.
3. Frimaire
You are received, shown
in out of the night air.