All night I walk
with the foxes
whose green eyes do
not see me and

a breath that does
not know me and
I tell you this:

humanity
while gaining all
has lost something.

Timeless rain, come carelessly, come
scour the furrows in the land.
You are most cathartic for the sky
and drop from fumbling hands.

Drumroll, drumroll - smiling, insist
yourself in grass and wood and fences
marked as Private. You are young snow
but with ambition. A stormcloud’s
in my head and you should know that
the world is drenched and wailing.

The sun is asking me to close my eyes
to trouble, to bend my will with his.
Sheep are running past the baking weeds
in double-time, marching to the bleats
of their folly-young, who look on
and follow the wrinkles in the land;

in case a godly hand should whisk them
up and out to weigh, they briskly run away.

For therapy, I found a place,
and that is all that's needed. Woods
provide a soothing face - and should
I need a quiet patch of peace,
I'll find it where I'm bound to. Trees
are goddesses of a Walden
kind of dwelling. In the forest
light is light, dark is dark, cycles
are the cycles of becoming.

Shh. My thicket is thick with it.
So I pick all the lower leaves
from the younger sapling trees
(barely inches above the ground)
so they shall grow before the rest.
And when I come back in summer
to treat my soul, I'll look for where
the trees are tall, and leafless too,
and that is where I'll find the truth.

We stopped beside the railings, years above

the harmless foaming spittle-waves, your hands

inside your sleeves as though you knew the land

would punish both of us before the shove -

which came without your help. I threw myself

into the breeze - you didn’t wheeze or cry,

but blankly watched your brittle lover fly

into the floor. I hit the coastal shelf,

survived the fall beyond all reasoned doubt.

The people found me somewhere safe to dwell

wherein my Clara couldn’t raise a hell

of my conditions. When I wanted out

they let you in. I thought I’d said enough:

‘Oh Clara, I do not deserve your love.’

The sprinting clouds ignore the cries
like clockwork, forming mushroomed plumes
and knowing only how to move,
they do: drift on, drift on, drift on.

Not caring what a kindness does,
forgetting how to stop and stare,
and knowing only how to move,
they do: drift on drift on drift on.

Thus deafened, keen to blindly steer,
a levitating orb survives
from knowing only how to move.
It does: swiftbomb swiftbomb swiftbomb.

We met between two hedges, a sly
passage cut out of evergreens for dogs
to escape through, children to avoid
by - you already had a twitch and breath
like the chosen one. Something lingered
on you on invisible shadows.
It was not physical. Nor were you.
Years later, I would plant hedges and
wait an age for them to touch, become
a passageway, and I would scour
their interleaving darkness for you.

I have a plague of planes upon me;
they travel such a distance
and yet are flat against the stars.
They draw their shadows on my passage.
They are undergoing an excavation
from that crazy distance, to
remove you from my soil.