my daughter sits nervously
at the table, her face flush,
the color of my hunger for
her absent mother.

a slice of sunlight through the
window collects on her plate,
refracts history into a dark corner
where she remembers what
it meant to be tethered to a
womb, to be two hymns sung
in one breath.

water takes the shape of
whatever holds it; lucille will
one day be a mother, giving
birth to the sea. no vessel could
contain a love for her child not
yet born, even now.

she understands death as
pageantry. if we bury the poems,
the words will sleep, every stanza
a clod of dirt shoveled back
into a sobbing earth.

after dinner, we pick apples
by the creek. here, now, is
all that we have, all that there
is. we live while we can,
between the orchards and
birches, watching silver water
flow onward, toward somewhere
and something more meaningful,
inexplicably beautiful.

one night in montgomery, i hitched
a ride on the back of a motorcycle
with a woman i didn't know.

in the cold, i watched clouds move through
a black sea like bodies of ice - heavily,
extinguishing stars that bloomed like
matches in the dark.

we raced forward, combustible, somehow
stationary. the pavement, wet, was the sky,
and we, floating, sank like stones into the
reservoirs of each other.

behind us, an anthem of streetlights, moon-pale, a mass of glimmering bones. ahead, trees, heavy with winter, folding over us, the air scrubbing our skin with fog.

the shadows swallowed us whole. we leaned
into the wind, levitating, letting our bodies be carried through them.

still, none of it is ever ours

smokestacks filling with rain,
our own throats retching rust
and debris, our bodies afloat
upon a morphine sea.

always wrestling with earth's
alchemy. my sons reside in an
underground kingdom i am
not yet allowed to enter.

i dive into the oxidized strata
of every autumn. mountainsides
migrate, these dilated bones
emerge from the bottom of
october's stony well, dry and
disassembled.

corridors of trees. through the
leaves, a thick matrimony of stars,
each one a reflection of the other;
mass upon flaming mass of
burning saviors.