The snow stops
at our bricks or windows or
it doesn't. It finds
a way into the cool grasp
of thought. It begins snowing through
language even. For hours. I can't
believe how cold it is.
What is this unshaken
peal moving through the memory
of a bell? Is everything
remembered here an appeal
of or to the dead? Just as sunlight
on the sleeper gathers
his shape into new dailiness.
Restless seagulls inch
across the backyard, peck a Casio
keyboard dusted with snow.
Cat prints fill in only
to disappear. In every now another
thing persuades at song’s loss. Leftovers
picked clean. Nuclear morning.
Can it really be so
strenuous, this letting the world
appear? An annual unfolds
or a page curls brown
at the tip. How does one manage
to say brown words? Melody is just
another word for hunger.
What little sadnesses
dance free from the black
backyard cable wires around which clutch
the joyously turned veins
of vines. Even in
the black I sense a blacker black
escape.
We visited your parents.
They bought us fish and tickets.
I broke your glasses.
The wolves are at the door.
This train is stopped due
to traffic ahead. We are sorry
for the inconvenience.
Seagulls gracefully circle
the hastily abandoned
bones of hungry schoolchildren.
It is bird weather where
I live every afternoon at half-past
three. For all
their grace the birds remain cannibals.
Do we ask a mountain
to explain itself? Do we ask blinding
how it became song? A girl
sleeps in the bed. A fine red hair
grows on her arms. My eyes
are clumsy, ensconced. Of course
I love her.
Is the light also as painful on
other planets? Who is more used
to sleep? Half-face, a warm clot
of folds. I bought this black
ring. I wear it
strangely. It does something wicked
to my form.
A rabid bat at
noon. My love and I under a nest
of branches. The pond’s song
playing against
them. Painting’s the tree’s
wish, but it remains doomed
to sculpture.
To protract, as to
elide contract. A tender
eye, as to avoid
a tense one. Otherwise part
of the eye is used to
trap the future. A sentence, as
to obviate ending.
After the rain the static
of birds tentative. A stray
car here or there
like white squall. What would home
be in this city of erupting
knees? This dancing city? You
need to speak up.
Wake neck stiff full less
from dreaming than these
stubbly bits of song. Nowhere’s
salutation. I ask you
where we went just moments
ago? Your fingers reply:
now here.
The whirling ceiling
fan jerks
the cerebellum into pulse
like a wet bell
whose tongue sets
off little forks
of white electric foxtrot.
Let the wit of ants
emerge. Be generous
to the bears. Some
tiny thing needs
time to work itself out
the window. Open
bird for breath.
The clouds in our ears
drain the garbage
truck’s shrill passage. Ad-
vertisements sickly ed-
ify the casual jaunt. Nobody
learns from the trees
on the street anymore.
The fire engines drone
their implausible
reminder: you are not at present
burning. Except that
they are wrong. The fire
engine’s crisis is one
of imagination.
Born of fire in the form
of dust. Ton-specks
speck-tones, stone-light, spectral
tongue to smoke
out a lightning of teeth.
A little fire in our jerk and swerve.
A little dust in our bone-knock.
Walking beneath the beery
twist of summer
branches, foaming
with a flutter of green head, I
teach the children strange
wisdom that will
only serve them in different worlds.
Ugly and beautiful at
once like a camel the tree
trunk’s fulsome
fold-wave works itself
into a standing frenzy
beside the silver sedan as sun
inches past our roof.
Truth is comorbid
with depression and failure
today. Light tuning
the page. Only sensations
that announce
the future from now
on.
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