You, predator, studious of commercials
I break the rule to learn it.
You symmetrical repository of faith
I learn to rule the break it.

Have your eyes always had the scattered look

of a woman scanning the room for exits,

with
no time to consider the precious intimacies
of skin

or the softness of faces in repose,

the vulnerable sacraments of open hands...

And have you, too, misread the calming waters

perhaps misjudged their depths?

Have you ever, daydream laden or heavily burdened

startled at finding your self, now,

this moment

gaze cast intently

beyond the bounds

of too frail a body

perhaps through your car window

for the broad pause a stoplight can fill,

perhaps in the rain

contemplating bright reflections

aberrant red

and introspective green

through the timpani
of falling water,

feeling the unfortunate gravity

of some unquantified source

at an undisclosed distance,

reaching without knowing

to release
the restraining belt

while, beneath the various
and distracting chatter,

you strain to hear the systole
at the heart

of the music you know could be found

if only you were free to follow?

"I write poetry,"  you laugh,  "I can tell beautiful lies..."

Sadly clever, your decoys reaching out to the dendrites of trees
desolated by winter, fingertips in their severe shapes stroking

lungs turned inside out so that they might breathe for you
when the patterns of things become as unwoven as they seem

and a dark symmetry throws smoke across the mirrors. All the
mirrors are rippling, frail as moonlight on the ruptured skein

of whatever is left of the water and then only the good doctor
as you turn to undress before the open door, waits.

You whisper: "I will tell lies you will want to believe."

This is not the sound of an ambulance sending its omens calling.
This is not my life- shattering crucible with its hot fluid burden.
This is not my stop and you won't tell me where to get off.
This is not a hopeful situation, my scared stupid found dumb looks
and cast-iron idols,
my insecure voodoo dolls clutching at their ******* buried headfirst in sand.
These are not mine.

This is not a math problem; it will always add to an improper sum.
This is not a miracle. This is not a ghost.
This is not a reflection in parabolic distortion
this chatter has nothing to do with thought.

shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Count how many things are blue.
How many balloons are in the room?
Light a candle and still the flame.
Clear the mind of intrusive thought.

Strike the bell and listen for the moment
between sound and silence.
Why is the dark sky at night black?
What is the nature of blue?

Finally. A question with an answer.
When, amidst the immensity of all things, she
exhales; the sound is tremendous.
It is a sound that has an end.

Science is the understanding that nothing is lost,
But everything winds down.

There is no beauty in science, some said, no art.
I refused: Some, God, silent doctor waiting at the door-
I refuse.

There is only this tragic struggle:
Your heart, carrying all the implications
Of a watch left in desert, must eventually fail to keep time.
I would know why the stitches that wound our heels,
Blossoms of Achilles, are the heart’s most desperate gestures.

I want to look at your heart, hearts.
Aspiring a capella,
The down-singing choir in my hand, your heart reveals.

First, I must understand the laws of motion,
Wave-forms, cryptic anatomy of silence and not-silence,
Only in your mind, your body is a law unto itself.

First, the Archaea, frustrating enigma that never speaks.
“Where did you come from?” I asked.  
You smiled, as if I were asking
Who of us is more than water?
Why aren’t the stars alive?

Selfishly, our endosymbiosis called its questions as demands.
How can this work?
You look like someone I knew before…
I want.
You cannot leave.

I must submit to examination.
The machine will tell us if my heart speaks in murmurs,
But not if I am heavier than a feather,
Not if we did or didn’t know what we were doing.
You invited me in, and it was raining so I stayed.

We violated the lens, spoke too longingly of light.
You saw the defined spaces between the foam.
In a tangle of bed linens, I dreamed of pulsing Farandolae,
Paired for synapsis, migrating to the metaphase plate,
Ripped from sound’s embrace by their reluctant roots.


*I will be vaccinated against harm, but not shadows, not time.

She paused for some time at the gate,
failing light passing through her skin.
She felt the plum of her living heart
strain veils of viscera to the unhinged
cup of clavicle, bellied ribs
undone by the wings of a dove:
the breathless little bird whose winds fluttered,
heavier than a feather.

He suckled from her scalp.
She fit his fists in her mouth.
They had not yet untangled
whose body was whose.

The door stood open for several weeks
impossibly
while the web spun between them in the womb
became the slow unraveling of a cocoon.

I rode again the horse cover
of night, where indiscrete yearnings
cast doubt upon the aerial
flagellate of milk spumed stars.
A jealous denial: their
froth no terrestrial hide.
How strange to imagine the stars want skin,
or kin,
and must think that I touch you
as if without consequence
moving my hands
from peals of belles to petals,
stamen, the flower unfolding
one cupped nautilus
full of a prismatic wanting.
This is how I learned that something larger
than me speaks in echoes
stands at vital distance
a shiver in the vacuum infinity...
Unimaginable. Infinity.

displaced to the sterile mercy of this place.
Diaphony withdrawn as probably as
destiny, recalling her palm upturned
to feel the grains that slip into
our sleepless eyes
where she dreamed our futures.
This thought threads arachnodactylous wisps
spreading their many jointed legs to fill
the dancing of a body well used.

I could have come sooner.
I could have divested the clatter,
the shine of baubles and nebulous distractions.
I could easily have offered my soul.

All you wanted: our eyes locked into a perpetual bliss.
All you wanted was a deep and endless pool
the darkness so complete
so comfortable, you said, so final.

You couldn't have fallen the coloured glass like
rain on the asphalt, and somewhere a sandman
dusted the reverie of the highway in downbeats
across the windshield an etude in betrayal.

The night before I tried to call you into the shower,
to call you with my body into the sacred space
that might have saved you for a moment
that might have closed the distance

strung too tightly, the tendons a terse
and gut kept silence of reserve,
between your bruised eyes and shutterred hands.

where every millenia one bird flies past
and alters the stone that would have sacrificed itself to idols*

The poem is written loosely in my clothing.  I wrap it into my hair
decorated with sighs as I prepare to leave home each morning
I check myself in the mirror and in all possible reflections,
just to be sure it hasn't unraveled in the absence of audience
or that some subtle aspect of it's beauty hasn't morphed
into something else since last I looked.

What you think is vain is simple.
Is there anything I might have missed?

Look again. Look again.
What have you missed?

How am I ever to find God when all I want is Art?

Given: To be an artist is to be driven solely by sin.
  
Lustful enough to encompass the world,
Greedy.

Vain enough to imagine that God with her many arms,
mother and eater of worlds
could be woven into the ascendant strata of my spine.
She could climb up from my gut a ladder built of the basest desires
and from the space between hemispheres, jump out across the synapse
as light cast into the void, and echo of herself to herself singing only *I am.

Sometimes I feel her creep the edge of sleep

Where the city is burning,
I dream her mouthful of ashes.
I taste her starfish nova against the tide.

Her body is a book of matches;
Mine, a text, highlighted and underlined.

She weeps the sea-scuttle into an undertow.
Her fulsome wing, span of nightshade,
Weight-casts the lure to take flight,
Carrying her two shadows into the valley.

He says: *Yes, I live in paradise.
The red tide is mine.
The bioluminescent.  The drowned,
The ungainly specie God has set aside.

The first thing he does.
He lets down my hair,
long neurons shiver, and the violin's
fascination couples to the bow,
silver pleading to my fingertips, a refrain,
the smaller portion of infinity…  

The heavy book presses upon the table,
open to Abraham, where God dwells in unnumbered stars like glass houses, and a charlatan speaks accidentally as a prophet,
as accidentally as I touch his hand.

We stay up too late, and the blue spark
he seeks is hidden, eyes in the lamp-dark, my haphazard wick and oil left untended.
He does not return my gaze.

Instead, he weeps at the tomb as the stone rolls away
from the fading mitigations of the holy ghost’s bed.

The first thing he does…*
In the pre-life world, a veil.
In the veil, a forgetting.
In the forgetting, a footprint…

He undoes the cascade, my barette,
for the same reason I read the book:
to remember from a distance what is here.

what is it about this landscape
early angle of light
bouncing from flat of glass to glass
in clean and eager cuts against
the visible shrouds of exhaust
expired breath of automobiles
darkly herded
swimming in their lanes
light still so separate from the dark
in the long arc of a hollow sun...
this dissonance the chilled shade whose eyes
close to brace the rising retinal burn
of an overbright disc resurrecting
illusions of warmth
what is it about this landscape
rimed with gold
that draws the wilderness in my gut
to grow hooves
to stamp and dig among the briers,
to eddy an inward sudden
too much a wayward compass,
those spooked adrenaline horses...
until I can answer this question
I cannot write the poem.

It as if Today, God speaks and You will be the vessel for all the sorrow in the world.
You are empty of self, everything you believe yourself to be is purposeless.
Today you will hold nothing but a sparrow and surrender.