wild abandon
scars – like a trowel through the ashes of
the dog we had to eat
when winter
made swollen our stomachs –
the days your fingers don’t
soothe my skin, it
pulls away its own ridges fresh
and I seep meltwater
thawing wild abandon
snow’s thick now but it started falling
when the mountains first tried
to shake us from their pelt –
we weren’t ready
neither was the woodshed
I burn your scarves
now that your blood thickens on some other beach
I pick up rocks from the frozen shore
and I wash my skin with the salt –
it’s the nearest thing
Broken ghazal for when I cut myself on gills
We bleed to breathe.
Air sticks, you breathe
out, spin the meats of
lung tissues as you breathe
loud. Bleed the teeming
dusts of old breaths, breathe
the bleeding lungs to some
rest. Gasp and inso breathe
my unrest, skim the surface
with your young chest. Breathe
and teach yourself to bleed
lest someone tries to breathe
that lesson deep into your skin.
We bleed to breathe
within, we breathe to bleed our
names in silence as we breathe.
12 canvasses
Monet stood in a circle of
canvasses twelve at once at
all times he’d sit and watch
and when it rained he’d
hold one out to
catch the blur
the wet shadows
waiting on cliffs with
feet planted his brushes
poised to fix onto
stretching canvas the
first rays of sun
beneath summer leaves he
let the shadows
collect among his brushstrokes
he never sat in a
studio and stroke after
stroke after stroke applied
paint but then
he went blind
when I am afraid of the
dark it is now and
always and I am always
walking the hall as if
off a cliff toe follow
heel follow toe I am
always five clammy in
the night even when I
am older the sky is
cold as I race through
black still gripped by
dewy bedsheets eyes
kept open by the feathers
and the fears in my pillow
eyes like his
open wide as the night always
painting blinking painting in a
black room the circle of his
paintings now his room to
squint with dying eyes
there are rumors that
Monet painted thousands of
canvasses at once because
his attention was the
length of his brushes it
snapped just as easily but I know
that his fingers knew
what his eyes could not
his fingers so attuned
to light they knew
the dark is always
looming in the shadows
I know this because when I am in
the day sometimes my eyes
shut rejecting all sun whisper that
it would be better at night
if I didn’t know
but then my warm fingers
remind me the sun is there
and I open my eyes for him
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
Sung by Bob Dylan
I used to shake awake at two in the morning
and think / my end is near and then I’d sing,
loud enough to hear / as if with every heaving breath
I sucked close the door to death / my voice like ash
because I burned and what came out spilled from
that urn /
then one night sat thick, panting, hot, heavy on my
chest and wouldn’t get off / I gritted the sheet and ground
down my teeth / and wrestled my hand to the knob
where it roared like my furnace lungs / and then I saw
the end of it all / and three girls had coals for eyes,
they turned their heads to face mine, / chorused a warning;
douse what you stoke spew gravel not smoke / and
sandpaper all of them – aim for the skin
we need to see that yes we bleed
What I mean to say is that we’re always moving at the same rate.
We blink awake. Feel the decay of dreams as
our neurons fire at 200 miles per hour,
dreams slipping in all-ways with the
million celestial bodies all-ways
slamming all-ways invisible
into us, us the gleaming gaping
gods of the heathen. We’re all-
ways wrestling gravity, wrestling
as we do with the sheets, stoic with
the state, the state and posture of
gladiators, we breathe the breath of
amazons, it all-ways catches in our
lungs when we are in love.
You tell me to come back, back to bed,
there’s no race babe, and you’re right
there’s never really a race you’re right,
no matter how fast I run all-ways I move
most at the instance of gaining the secure,
when I vow captive by your tongue.
There’s a ringing in my ears like bells,
like jealous gladiators all-ways toiling tolling,
like celestial churches crowded all-ways with
an excess of wanton idols,
crying out, losing all-ways and all-ways
winning, but never as holy as all-ways
are the steeples between us.
Dry Feet in Sunken City
I wasn’t looking for the ocean
stepping happy in the desert dry
airkissing dust akick across the sun. You
hail from the mountains, met me as
a crashflood stormed the canyon. Flashflood
rains swept us riverquick to brine we hit
the sea sprinting tumbled fast by the
stream with eyes aglint we pulled back
our sleeves peeled back the
waves, we sifted coldercurrents the
darkest drifts and saw the ruins. Those
barnacles they needed scraping, we
called the toothysharks the
whales they chorused briney the
chandeliers, plankton hoisted
pillars and we, fumbling salted in
the foyer, its marble still bare of
growth its domeceiling still
shoving off the blue’s refracted
light, legs atangle echoing like us
hinting at poolnoises the sounds
of dolphins loving dizzy in the distance
ahum beneath our every breath.
back on beach my skull sways awash
seaweed drifts past my irises my ears
house shells reverberate with you you
you awaken the undertow
my chest plunders, tugging it pulls me
under I wasn’t looking for a city
lostandfabled by the ages failed by
the oppositeoflove but we
we shout watery echoes we
found it bounce off
waves we sound the conch found the
dolphins who sound it we found the
city of nothing and somethinged it
blessing
I light forever the effigy that you strung up with
pins in place of a heart
I hunt your loosed thoughts
they lied even as they
slithered past your tongues
I take into my fist
the gods you gave up on
they are pulverized
into powder so thin
as fine and powerless
as you made mine
I skewer into your retinas the
blinders you’ve always worn
I hold your throat close
I christen you dead
smash this bottle like
the skull you never had
Nervosa
I.
When I refocus,
when the ripples resolve
I see the red bags
around my eyes
in the bowl of a toilet.
II.
Invert into the sky and fly with reedlike bones, unzip
nerves and bared they gulp each other down
in prayer like serpents. They tell one
another how I visited God,
offered my dignity,
my throat.
III.
If I had eyes in the back
of my head I’d be star-
gazing, guilty for cough-
ing in these woods. If I
had eyes in the back of
my head I’d be smiling,
somewhere. If I had eyes
in the back of my head I’d
keep them open for fear
of seeing inside my skull.
IV.
I’m caught red-eyed, like –
I’m caught like venison
cooked thin in summer heat
like a sinew.
Sinew:
all that remains.
V.
Stuffing a notebook with my bones eat me whole, line
after line,tearing pages and pressing them down my
throat in throes of hope that the words are torn out,
that I will be cored, my stomach when finally held up
be unmarked by teeth.
VI.
Flush
-ed red, flush down the
-n shake,
sob. Skin off
-ered up, cleared out
for skull to
skid hard a
-gainst tile.
Feels good, the
brittle.
VII.
Focusing, I hear only the
footsteps of my cheekbones.
Sway to the tune. I can’t
hear much beyond my marrow.
Someone From Silence
Out past cold midnight, sleep
catching at bare treetops, us
far below, in the
murk of seeing our lungs
hearing them
condense. Me saving
what I could in the space
behind my eyes. I
remember most
the silence, quietly muscling
the narrative.
Your slower hands
palming your beard as you read
colors on the gray
frosted ground.
The stars nestle
into their constellations,
holding their
breaths. Our voices
punctuate
the full and crackling quiet,
fizz in our chatting
elbows, spice
on dry silent lips, crescendos of
this is nice, which means
everything, hands
humming with cold, fields
missing cows, you
spinning thoughts. Me
watching. When you
stop, say you
can tell a lot about someone
from their silence.
Look at me. A tiny
silence, taut. Then
coil, spring, heelclick spin silently here here there here
stop. Static. Stop. Still.
I walk down the hill,
slow, you below, small
in your joy on that hill. You
grin tall, parted lips,
a wisping breath, a
hearty laugh. Then
memory shoves my veins grabs a
fistful a writhing musky mass of capillaries it
presses hot with feet scrabbling arms
bulging against my chest around my lungs but
the moment
unpeeled
was silent.
seek
you hide things like
you hide your eyes
in your palms
play hide and seek with
the passing swans
I saw you give your words
you gave your voice
like you hide your eyes
you were grave like a
baby playing
pekaboo
wise like a grave like
those people whose
lives now saturate stones
and I hear you moan
though only at night
you gave the words you own to the
flight of an eagle and the eagle
lit on fire
flew high flew higher
now when you do speak
you speak the sky beneath his wings you speak
falling embers that singe and sing
and yes they’re bright
light everything
falling so close to the source of things
but the silences between are like
stepping into a fridge
I want to give you your words back
I want to follow the
flight path of the eagle and its
raven brethren I will
wrap my nets about them
bring them wing
by wing
wrestling
them into your chest
will you let me personally wrench them
from the sky I will kill them
I will kill them
I will kill the wide open spaces
by kindly calling your flock in and
cutting out their faces
you hide things like
you hide your eyes
in your palms
I saw you give your words
I want them back
so reach out and
twist the string that
tightens
when you are near
that stretches from my lips stained
to my clean feet
rip it clear from my chest
you deserve to rest in that mist
those updrafts
shut the part of your heart that still drafts
its essays here
I won’t plunder them if you stay up in clear
skies empty of noise
you gave them your
voice and though I want it back
it’s not something you should let me have
fireflies at 2am
The rain tapped
me a question
on the shoulder
asked my pores
to open loamy
loose the seeds
I answered like
yes I will find your
goddamn lighter
but I wasn’t really
mad because if
I could actually
ignite the rain
so that it fell like
wet embers, that –
that would look
like the way I feel
when we walk past
black trees at night.
in the evening,
my grandmother dusts the coffins
collects their driftwood, if we ask
she lets us look, run with the grain
she tilts our chins back when we
shed the dust with tears and sews the
sequins back into our eyes
we watch her pull seeds from her handbag,
wait with pink mouths awash in silence, then
she tucks the seeds into the back
we grow tongues to taste the cinnamon she spills
like an aztec spilling blood on an altar
we pray to spices and golden things
