THE HYPNOPOMPIC REVELATIONS OF MAPLE STREET

A red curtain

Of hair

Parted by air

A yellow lighght overlooking

The white bed black

Cat lingering like flora

And the muscular promise

That inhabits

One’s daily collision

With exteriority

The successive

Moment’s horizon

Radial, glittering, already

Talking it out

As these cells divide

Myriad, queasy, suffusing

The body with chatter

The bedspread sun

The boy surges through

Into the fingers that

Terminate in a man

Mitigating darkness

Or reveling from nerve

To bone, to know

One has only to move

As the palpitations continue

Caressing a wreck

Of resurfacing affect

Reggaeton in a sudden

Street level throb

The airplanes lately

Bothersome

Like a miracle

That keeps heaving

Its gasoline feedback

Sonata for late

Millennia or all

These nihilists

On parade yet

Just to wake

On Maple

Is to be pervaded

By a slow slow

Reverence

And even the birds

Harvesting bones

On Nostrand

Squawk and dodge

To the rooftops

With simple glee

Church bells turning

The streets on

Or resetting one’s ear

To the difference

Between the shower

With and without

Its dampening body

To dampen the slack

Water radio static

The daysong streets

Wrenching arias

To arise commonly

In this liquid poison

Air we deem

American spirit

Knuckles split

By a dancing praise

“For Reverend Green”

And the revelations

Of friendship

This collective thud

Against the nothing

That forever

Bares its straw teeth

Against the obviousness

Of wonder

Which dutifully waits

For sense

To arrive, to blare

Here is easy

As is this

Obscene shrinking

Into wealth or

A circumspect success

When there is sun

Sustaining the earth

Amid its unthinkable

Threat, heat, there

Is only a song

To be sung by friends

Beginning again

In the middle

Having just woke

A shape in the process

Of becoming

Something even

More unknown

As the fire trucks

Rumble past

And another airplane

Hoarsely roars

Its yawed acknowledgment

Of America

Her swimming

Pools and patchwork

Farm geometry

A kettle awhistle

In the kitchen

Where a woman

You love makes

Breakfast nude

And a fine red hair

Grows on her arms

Which crack an egg or

Pour the milk

State changes everywhere

In this glowing penumbra

Of abundance and melt

Take a second

Look into the of

That is the air

Around you

And tell me

It isn’t enough