There were efforts to sling a steeple around a cloud,
to enclose a smoke ring in a palm,
bring a mountain to a riverbed. They failed.

Something of a Pythagorean charm is retained
for garbing oneself in white,
the precision of mathematics
performing beautifully the rites.
To refrain from bean-eating.

One who has held their hands
beating the air
for a long time
gains a kind of theorem for dignity,
despite having no solution to show.

Wrinkles reveal this was not the beginning but
a palimpsest, set over another work so old
the efforts must continue as the equation foretold.

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 sudden accumulation of windy days. The hardening off of pondering in and over landscape. The chirrups of crickets carrying last songs outside the bedroom window. The evacuation of moisture and then the foilage coinciding with the bursting air; the downed leaves incidentally.

I take the fat bottle of wine from the shelf,
the smooth of its label and its dimpled punt
in both my hands as if to weigh it
before palming its slender neck knee-high.

It's placed in a crisp paper bag for me
and then it's swinging against my step,
snug from the stained-white roads,
in quickening tread my grip forgets its hold.

Already my eye gleams its opening
before a swift and satisfying emptying.
Blood pouring bottle dismissed
cork whereabouts, unknown.

A man must walk with a certain swagger when alone,
Falling sharply through all the corridors of the world,
Unaffected, thinking of the women who may receive him.

This, the Fall and the tangle: the acuteness of past days brought to their brittle end.

No more time is granted for all your half remembered mornings' dreams then before the heart's ready sacrifice, heel bone's tread.

When the leafy mass of vegetation has filled in
All the corners of the northern world's frame

And we are hemmed into its cool fragrance
To which we thought no more could be added,
This evening adds itself to the completed sum.

And caught in the updraft,
We let time reveal its material;
And I am glad to let the mote of dust float across the warmth of the long shadows
And linger there in the afterglow.

As if ornithology was the Esperanto of poets
wishing to construct a phoneme or pheromone
to extoll the details rather than build the case.

Spinning from my orbit as you, wondering
in sparse moments cleared by rain
do birds perch along the Grand Elysee in Zaatari?

And humans, uprooted, children too knowing blood:
what mode of classification, what terms to agree on
face-to-face down those dusty avenues?