Now that the proper instruments are arranged
his time of inscription nears.

He reads from the last page, backwards there
to find the beginning.

Whisking away the presumptions of page one
as mere suggestibility;

to read as the author reads is mission.
Why follow the staged footprints?

The book that neatly folds light between fine feathers
keeps out of sight what he wants,

headlong to reverse truth north, find relativity false  
to find the blazing word for "now."

The legs are two folded petals
tucked supplely under the weight of your torso.

The arms are a cloak thrown over the thighs;
hands are the frayed ends, fingers the wands.

The head nods at the end of its stalk
from day to day, toppled;
often forgetting it is attached.

Shooting up through you sits "The idea."
It balances over top the body and head like an egg.

The heart is gunfire,
semi-automatic.
Your hidden heart stands above the rest,
gnarled and crimsoning the strands.

It has grown into all parts of you,
and all your parts have inscribed into it
the memory of percussion.

It's surface is darkest as it shrinks into an endpoint
with no recess but the last fold.

See, I've no way to confirm that which you see,
and you may say the same about my acoustics of memory.

I've already embarked into my curvilinear home, perhaps
hoping to find there a material of permanent memory,
gone to sleep within a Fibonaccian trace.

Always preferring to follow the pink of a surface
till it's impossible to see.
You might not think it a good thing,
but I quietly must disagree.

Begin by touch: smallness is all
For the world is hungry passively,
wanting so bad to oxidize
the interior of us.

The slipped knot of now into will be
is such a gentle strand,

the braid undoes itself from yesterday
as easily as a garment's clasp,
as easily as abseiling liana.

Can I hold soft
the line?

To not look back
but keep the mountain's imprint
emboldened in the eye

To unknow
the difference from ascent and descent.

O day, o cloud: what do you know
that hasn't been pressed through my palms?

Regardless of the insignificance
her voice even shudders at the loss,--
though she makes light of it,
the smell of burnt food curls in the air
and will take hours to dissipate.

Men are better cooks, she says.
Studies show they concentrate on one thing:
they won't clean while they cook.
But then, they cannot grasp efficiency.

Her breakfast is ready by mid-afternoon--
and perhaps I could have made it better.
I've made the perfect dish already
and am still lamenting its disappearance.

Sometimes the difference between men and women
by the time we sit down to feast,
we are still lingering over accomplishment
and they've moved on to entertain the next meal.

We are, though we cannot understand it,
endlessly hungry
while they are preparing the dish.

You remembered June when this morning's sun
was there with the care of a father's hand
etching each leaf into filigree--
or with the unsequestered heart of a crazed lover
with his impossible love letters and artifacts
of century's old over-ripened fruits
that even as they hung precariously from the oaks
dazzled and made space for the stark blue.

A change from last night.
The constellate, dispersing fog
that brought the sense
of an overwhelming descent to a seabed,
the submersion a baffling return to a night
from childhood, enclosed at all ends
and unknowable. A shut book.

2.

Warmth lingers on skin even after
a few minutes of exposure, a caress.
Then, step outdoors and the wind,
whose listlessness and beauty
picks up your step and hurries you on
with characteristic mercilessness
through the cold.

While you were sleeping and roaming and reading
it has crept into the uninhabited crevices,
under doors, fuseboxes, the shades of streetlights
to mold like frost.

3.

Cold is a life-form,
growing and budding in the absence of green.

And it is at this time of year we strangle
the neck of uncertainty.

The sun peeks. The cold air climbs
out of the bottoms and hollows of things.

When it reaches an excitement, as now,
her absence reveals herself:
there is nowhere you can touch her body.

She is the thousand particles
she is the spacing in between:

twirling, gathering and thrusting through the streets,
she calls you to witness her now as she comes
like a first snow.

Lest my tongue be burnt
and all words I loved disowned
as children tossed out
from the mouth that cradled them
to wander foreign countries alone,
I caress from the creases of my fingers

my english,
this full length mirror
a street girl carries crooked
under her arm and breast--
a horizontal slant nuder than flesh
making meaning in flashes.

Where is it going, bumping along?
Jarred and crashing and beaming
like a throwing up or endlessly exacerbated jazz.

The singer who could charm the world
with a humble reed, must indeed
be in love with words,

yet always this english
why is it you hold out in your upturned hand
precisely what you are at once pulling away,
as if no where pleased you to linger
and so you congeal at the table with us
neither shining nor dissipating,
like a dark matter.

I sang for the certainty of mahogany
the solidity of brass:
where you would meld back into lake
be healed to the pond's surface,
permanently affixed to sky
given back to the unopposed silence
where they might remember us in times to come.