The sun, faraway, pools gold I can touch
onto your hair. All I can see
at this distance from you
is the infinite lighted space between thin threads.
I lay through you, limbs wrapped
by the root of our skins.

I lived on North Street. I would try
to outrun my dog in our small backyard.
I hung drawings on a clothesline in the morning,
and stared into an eclipse in the afternoon.

You lived on many streets. They would smoke
in the summer. When your mother dressed you,
you laughed from the tickle of grass
imagined under your feet. You would say
to yourself, again and again, the nickname
your father gave you, so you’d never forget.

Your eyes under me look up.
Can two people cross and stay, I ask myself.
Their brown—translucent, wavering
in the sunlight, I see, told all.
To hold you as my belief
was a fragile possibility.

I believe in the Southern pines
because I cannot you anymore.
I believe they will keep us passing by
in your white flake car along this road,
for I believe in the Southern pines.

They will not see me kiss
your free hand, your eyes close, or
your breath as it settles, light as snow.
They will only see
a white flake car passing.

They will not know why
your eclipse on the amber window
will bring my soul to tears,
for all they know has been
a passage along this road.

I will want to come back one day
and park my soot of a car
on the side of the road.
I will want to climb any way I can
to sit and watch from their branches.

But for now, I will just believe
in the Southern pines, for I cannot you.
Believe they will keep us passing by
in that white flake car I see
in the distance, approaching.

I try to figure a way
to pull out true thoughts
or words or whatever the
thing would be in your hands,
from discordant electricity,
buzzing, blaring around—
a transformed white off the walls.

But color’s too bright, they have
the growing music that’s
supposed to make you feel
the bad’s going good, the
single mom will take care of
her baby, those mascara tears
will rise black backwards up
like the night sky of the
beginning, because the
beginning makes sense.
It was starless.

Her singing sounds
good to everyone’s ears,
it seems like.    

All I can make is TV sense.

Flying apart implacably
is the unruly setting.
Unknowing, unduly spreading
yet asking me (perhaps unfairly)
to hold it pressed against myself
to maintain and withstand
the force with my fibers
to keep the parts from trembling
to somehow keep the whole.

It screams aloud, it screams perforce.
It’s a painful constriction all around.
But stoically it lets me know
with eyes choked and bulging
The dire effort must be so.
So do not let me go.

We our the basest of all
the basic and fundamental.
We are subatomic
subatomics.

Now, we are searching
them and knowing them
as fundamental, stilled
in the glass we peer
and wonder all it is
that we wonder.

But we are them.
And so we wonder—
How can they be
the ones that make us
wonder?

Smalt sky smelted over running sky: swoop
down for me and switch (very lightly!) your blues.
(No dizzying aches, please, because of too much
hurled change, speeding spirant through my loops.
It would tunnel me, with its head, even more
abhorrently
in two.)

Okay, I’m—great!—upside down now, float splashing
with finned wings in cloud falls and snowy rapids!
Up above, before now I guess, was just a bedlam
like below, and below: just reflection of its head spun.
The running was glinting, mirrored tails shimmering
of wind fish. Believing them, I fed them, then laughed
under wet sun.

I am lying, truthfully. I am inside my house. There was
no sky or sea. Maybe somewhere, but not here. I think
of my love when I sit down. (I don’t really think
much anymore.) And the blues is a saying.
The dizzying aches I do have (It was a joke.)
and the hurled change I am is inside me making
me this.

My loops, me tunneled—that is no joke, that’s the
timelessly wrought result of extruding what hurts
from my sockets and chambers and lobes and pockets
and the given gifts to me I hated, never used, only
wished I could—I can’t—because I can never
pin me down. So they can’t be really
for me.

I am furiously disappearing in obfuscating, invisible,
paralyzed               paradoxical                paroxysms.
Such as: I am not here I am just here. Lying down
sometime. Today I think. On my bed. Napped or slept
or just wrapped. Barely awoken. And more gone.
Each day awake. Going.
More gone.

My life is the need
the telling you
it’s this.
The wait for the end
to end in something all over again
to end.

Heaven hands to handles around
bus metal shoot cold shrapnel up fingers
when the streets of the usual routes
jump
to tell something new. That lingers.
Ah, her expression through air
has showed me time.
It was hope—easy dizziness, speeches
bouncing off the sky’s edge for
destitute souls, long lost in whirring
sea-sharp staring…

Yes, I have claimed nothing but the battle.
It was white branded on the bus’s windows,
those other silent faces sitting being
subsumed in her airy picture, the
grumbling soothing sough of the motor preaching,
reaching over the cymballed mountains out there,
shaking the earth under my feet.
Then the crash, her face swept
under the bowing, the rolling waves, no breath, merciless.
Boding nothing but the battle. Still the battle.
An end to nothing.
Isn’t that something.