Little waves

Why not make poetry out of Tsunamis?
Your oceans are so small, too small to carry home the local coast
That amounts to too little water and too little wind in your canal
Too few ripples in this rogue ocean you carry inside you
After all your energy, all those little valves and capillaries
Those miniscule rivers hidden inside your liquidity,
that flowing invisible pasture
This is not God talking
God is just something you invented to share the blame
His flow, anyway, is the only cinematic blip in your apocalyptic surface
Ride on for a little, these Warholian minutes
That you continue to be so fond of
Here today gone tomorrow
Generally, elsewhere, even

What does not stand upon words?

What does not stand upon words?
The blue snow melting in the palm of your hand
Your miniature face in the hesitant drop
The murmur of your electricity
Sounding to the chatter of tiny birds

What will not stand upon words?
To give them form and purpose
How the brightest light becomes
So burdensomely heavy
How love passes through
The sieve of hearts
So effortlessly
And so permanently

How could we stand upon our words?
The pure stillness of your hair in my face
The counting and bearing of moments we are apart
The defiance of our stand on eternity

What cannot construct upon words?
Our precious, plausible, monumental selves
Our noumenal sense of longing
The kindness of the evening glow

What cannot come to pass
In these remorseless seconds
Of blue and precious memory?
I will stand for you
and you will stand for me
As these hearts and fragments sense
Which words will stand and stand alone.

She gone

She gone her skirts burned at the beginning of the wheel
one wheel the dull stairs, the ones where the fields
are stretching past the rectangle of the window
Before she knows her time is out now--you must silence
the stiffening step and she gone, her skirts at the wheel
This is the sound you know, have come to know,
The look over the shoulder the just beginning

She gone 2

(Before she is the small curve of time from the beginning)

I am already gone sanctified
one wheel has cracked the remedy is broken
the rutted road is no longer passable
In the distance I can see the fields breathing into the ocean
See how the Phragmites dance in the wind
From here there is only a small curve of time
between the beginning and the end
She’s gone my lively laughter lifting
onto your table herself the one wheel only
--you must be silenced with the terrified of her
This is her shoulder her skirts stepped over, useless
She’s at the end again lively and very wanting to know
She ends horrified before you can come to her
This is the time: Before she becomes all that remains
Before she is the small curve of time from the beginning

Someone else lives in this house

Someone else lives in this house
Up the stairs in the eaves on the north side
behind the far bedroom I think
I know because I have begun finding things
Odd things, out of place during the whole of a dull, dark,
and soundless day, in the autumn of the year,
When the clouds hang so oppressively low in the heavens.
There was the night the eviscerated fawn screamed like a murdered child
The night the wind formed echoes of other people’s voices down in the hollow
I often passed alone, through a singularly dreary splash of country,
Looking out upon this dream, knowing that someone else
lives in this house up the stairs behind the bedroom wall
I have looked closely at these other lives
And have begun to sense the urgency of this place
I think in the eaves on the north side
I know because I have begun finding things, certain things
In and around the soundless evenings
with the constant drawing of the voice
this view from the other side, this finding of things
And others, out of place and even others,
Someone else, through the entire length of day
found when the clouds are in the heavens,
multiplying this melancholy with the
sternest of supernatural images
within the desolation of a dull, dark,
and distant shade, I singularly perceived
that dreary and terrible reverie,
Up in the north far bedroom
Low out beyond the passing tract of country;
upon the scene itself, as the stairs rise
behind the eaves one year, the knowing then
that I am not in this house alone

We had a predilection for flying

At least this moment, for at least this moment
We had a predilection for flying,
Sitting far back in seats 146b or 175c
Next to the window, the back of the plane
And if sometimes, passing over the marble steps of the palace
or the hidden interior of our own secrecy or sometimes after barely clipping our abyss
Of reluctant assimilation to reveal the mournful solitude of our dreaming
We would wake again drunk with the wind and everything that was flying with us
Over this dense black mirror of ocean everything that was supposed to be guarding us and
Our practiced stumbling our flight out of the tunnel our reeling into
The blinding light that we surged past now as if we were unaware again
As if we had just thrown ourselves up into the air and reached our hands out to fly

I love the purring of knowing them

I love the purring of knowing them,
So I will be moving the useless telephone
Of my monstrous self to the ubiquitous ringtone
That has been disrupting everyone's sleep
When is a heaven such a useless tell?
The letters and burning envelopes
Resting so soft and full on the edge of your bedside table
Are the only existing explanations of our archeology.
Listening to the warm purring of the flames against the laid paper
Reminds one how unpredictably disaster follows reticulation
These all should arrive in your post next week,
the edges of the burning, the purring, and the love.
Asking you only to tell them that I am gone, lover,
That we found all the evidence lover, and went ahead
anyway, with full knowledge of our actions.
I scratched all this conveniently in the mahogany
On your side of the bed

he saw her everywhere

Cracking hard wood, a soft springing to the earth, the voice of his mother
Flight, so far out of reach, so seemingly clear his choices
He named her something very secret and told no one
Every year there came a birthday, an anniversary
Every moment there was something missing
Every day was a journey further away, sound became muffled, his sight
Spotty at best with no clarity, he began imagining that he saw her everywhere
Once, there was an odd shadow across the room. He was not listening to the words
Objects began to have faint lines holding in their forms, the colors seemed to crash against each other
Objects began to lose their form. Then color became form
Somewhere, very far away, there was the sound of water dripping
How many ways are there? He put it aside for several days
No one came in the beginning; it was far too frightening
Wondering how it would be to walk past the open door
Again, the cool air, the smell of the earth