DISLOCATIONS OF ASTONISHMENT

Landed in Albuquerque, drove
To Santa Fe, doves
Scattering in the driveway, my sister

Was reading about Mormons, my mother
About mystery in the Virgin
Islands, I slept on a bed composed

Of air, chased it
Each morning with a cup
Of coffee, a storm

Hit and the ponderosas dutifully
Bowed, a skunk rooted
Beneath the hot tub, near the night

Spider whose body resembled
A bird’s egg and was ornamented
By a single diamond, all

Week I chucked rocks against the monotonous
Adobe, my shoulders turning
Pink, the clouds turning charcoal as so

Often morality dwells in the driving
Out of fear, so that what
The centrifuge flings malingers unseen

And this wall remains nothing
More than a loose flag
Of fingers draped idiotically

Across the eyes, we need not be
Let alone, we seek the acknowledgments
Of company amidst

This cycling of refuted systems, the shocking
Green eyes of a young girl
Named Kori widen as she tells me of an elevator

The size of a living
Room and I watch as hummingbirds
Spar in abrupt fits over

A dish of sugar water, I myself
Worry over a world grown
Pathologically soft in its revulsion

Of horror, in its acceptance of error
In the late summer breeze
My forearm hair feels particularly

Inarticulate, receiving so much deciphering
So little, too often I invigorate
A line of discourse only to have it

Stump when the telephone
Rings, I dreamt I was a comedian
And the audience was

Laughing so hard I never
Was able to tell
A single joke, so here

It is—the work that I do does
Nothing to things, I leave home to imbibe
The dislocations of astonishment, to lose

My way and find another, tricking
The moments into line
Before defecting into rearrangements

And if I write as if language
Were a series of decrepit apartments
Harboring squatters

I am apart, the sun
Penetrates where the air
May not pass as

Each experience happens twice, even
The panic you feel returning
Home to a strange figure in the dark, even

If it turns
Out to be the innocuous
Shadow of a Buddha

Planted among the flowers in the garden.