(And you crack yourself up.
And you shake your head.
And your heart shakes you.
And your little mouth
          shuts.)

The void is formless,
and only formless can be filled.
What is the void? It is everything
else, the sound
sounds do not make, the taken up in sight ever
unfolding into space.

It is not desire or despair
or the lukewarm blend, but more
if stillness were ever moving
and motions froze to one,
if I myself observed myself absorb the self
not myself.

They say indescribable, but it is
being described, every single moment.
They say incomprehensible while we are
knowing, every single moment.
I see it around and around these
words as if, here, dancing in mist of white alluring,

there is a magnetized fire, being encircled.
Please tell me you see the unseeable also.
That you can hear the day beseech the night
as fierce the night cries out for day.
I live and live in that resounding auditorium, and have
heard nothing, empty echoes, for days.

Stream streams, runs, speaks
in water to me, blind over
tongued rocks. Don’t wake up,

her sweet heat dropping over
my face. I don’t. I want her to
continue smiling with her eyes

like she is, hands through me.
I’m the grass in her fields and
she’s alone in them. I let her be.

An impossible color gleams in
shut eyes—maybe

veiled incarnadine, stirred in
splotched mauve, clearing dull
blue-black, streaming vibrant

because water is streaming
through air into myself, because
the high red sun is falling down.

A thin membrane’s between it all.

If I find the far distance inside
that short space, the chained
filaments appear, then glow,

shift, float, stream. I think of
seeing stringed symbols of
broken infinity, but I don’t

focus on that, I let be.

Kaleidoscopically gemmed
rainbowed streaks begin to light
the world, slowly, move my eyes.

As I move, they move, and
pour in the hot white of
awakening, o her smiling eyes.

I would die to say here, truthfully,
splaying my arms round as the sky,
this, this! is how it is possible to live
and not sink under a faint surface,
and not run, windfaced, against a distance,
and not lay down, weary as nothing.

This is how it is possible for us
to look without shaking skin or heads
or blenching eyes, writhing like mangrove
limbs in this incomprehensible slough.
To live as discovery of life and still not know
if ever we were born, or when, if ever, we’ll have
died.

But to you, I cannot say this, truthfully.
My person is not truthful. It has a voice
you hear through air in the daytime, I am
not truthful to you. Else I would be
fringes of all time
stretched. You cannot see me, truthfully.

I am ground movement, just under, welling
untouchable imperative unattainable.
Are you bound by the point to create
your own destruction, as I? Then proclaim it
yourself, truthfully, waving your fresh
roots out to me, soil juiced and ripely plucked.

I will try to remember crossing the plains from
dawn till dusk, before I made the world fragile.
If I do, I will dissolve, and will come out your
breath, speaking truthfully. But will you remember
too? So that, disappeared, I may find you?
I would not have to die, then, truthfully.

I didn’t know how to begin
this one, in it there was too
much and too
much
crashing together,
made me believe there had
been an explosive

nullification of this, really
this just crept
closer, too close and
too closer underneath
whose jutting nose
is nowhere.

What are you looking at?

Sad is the love song to the woman
whose eyes unfocus beyond you.
Sadder yet is the love song
strung in the eyeless dark
to the woman who no more has
ears for you, though maybe still
a heart.

Special spoiled soup
du jour spoiled
too soon by
the chef. Too much
salt.