On the clear days when I’ve got water…
On the clear days, when I’ve got water through my hands

and I’ve got water in me that’s not just around me
in a blanked blue of roiling waves and wings…

When I’ve got that water in me
I remember how the shore really was.
I remember when I first touched the still sand
and laid my feet down on your warm to rest.

Just before the orange sets in above, I sit down
along the edge of the raft and look about.
Still that open water.
Sky seeping under golden red from that living garden.
Years of memories, years through many eyes
passing through me.

Your face has dissipated
to a forgotten air I breathe every moment.  And still
I breathe
towards a bare horizon.

Even nirvana must be empty.
Even silent revelation must allow herself to be taken, afterward,
by noise.

Kept, perhaps, might be a few
thoughts—the principles of salvation, maybe, easily incorporated
orts

soaked up, scooped with bread.
Chewed, passed—as everything, habitually—disintegrated into in-
visible

fuel for the festering divisions.
(Precisely those divisions sought to be stilled by breathing deeply,
crossing

the legs of, still, a body.) But
even nirvana must be swallowed by the Buddha’s gaping mouth
of transience.

For afterward, must it not stay,
still, the same? After achievement? Yes, I like to mock as I loll, in
naivety,

but I am also a talented nurturer
of it. I know behind is something quite valuable. A transient irony,
perhaps.

I have no answers for you. Just
a suggestion. Look

at the embryonic movement
of people dividing in New York

and suddenly stop thinking.
Then look at cattle grazing in Iowa

black as sheets of obsidian
monumented against

deepening chalcedony, the azure of

openness, and suddenly

begin again

I’m sure, now, how to think
of slivers that shine stillness
in my river, moving faster:

When the river’s glass, it’s
my light returned to rest at
home, in childhood, forever.

Though also in this glint of
ice, the image of my final
stroke—mirrored ever after.

~~ ~~

In glint of glassed silver ice
I see the mirror of my body
as I saw        once my body,
               as
will see        once my body:

Fluid as the water is, fluid
         as the water is.

This vast outside—these
opalescent stars, collections of
glittering clusters rotating
around a dense eye—
seems pearly still
and still somehow is
fluctuating (your dense eye,
quivering, your
tumescent mouth,
opening, your note,
pitched through air, air
rippling, a bird,
taking flight here, alighting
there, a few leaves
shivering)

all is in accordance with
the imperceptible draw
of
imperceptible strings
strung within
your vast universe inside.

Even behind what’s in
            tears            
          
            or a thin threaded gasp
            ***** high above in the sky,
            suspenseful, waiting,
            for lightning or clearing
                                  
            behind
            the heavy fast rolling
            breathing of love, rushing through
            its mountains, ascending

            behind its ecstatic release

            as behind running, and
            the score of a goal, the
            sweet flush of a compliment,
            even a single
            laugh, a single warm
            touch
            of another’s creation, of life,
            a soaking flower sprung
            up from your thirsty desert of a
            skin

is dopamine, and
            a cycle of reward, seeking
            more reward, seeking more
            reward.

But behind that
            
            tell me of another.
    
Living towards resurrection.
    
One sinking in to feel the all out
            which forms the one
            in which one sinks      
            back into feeling
            all in one.

The being you (as you, you must)
            so as to feel
            also what's not. Which

is also you.

The being not
            that which you hope
            so that you may
            forever hope.

And so you'll be, and so you are,
            and so have lost.

Will find again.

Have already.

Now is the time your memory
has not yet settled,
is still in the air—just stirred, with mine,
the visions, entwining.

I’ve tossed you the football, the soft-colored one
made of frozen egg-white foam
and now you look so embarrassingly beautiful
trying to spiral back to me. Instead,
it’s your smile.

So now I know—later, I will write you,
saying I’ve never forgotten this way you look
held in this heat, caressed by this wind.

How the sea is roaring! How it seems
to have just found its voice, never more
heard in me than now.
And the waves, rolling like the tongue of a dog
coddling at its absolute happiest.

But what do I look like to you? Do I look like
my naked spirit, winnowed?
Because that’s what I am in front of you now.
Must only the ocean notice, and wait before
it, too, gets washed away?