The pastor is preaching, is trying to hit
the heart today: What really is Mass, why
is it the center of our faith, why really do we
come? Familiar questions I’ve asked (though
minus the m.) Now this is interesting. He says,
this church is Bethlehem, the home of bread.

His voice is gradually becoming a mewling
through the microphone that annoys me, the
strings in his box tightening to a choke like
ends of piano wire, almost always to tearing.
I can’t see past the doxologizing, but it sounds that
this is why we come, his eyes might just have torn.

It is the day of the nativity of some
Lord, or incarnate God, or son—an almighty
Savior. I guess I’d be histrionic too, then, if I
knew there was something called my Salvation.
If all that was needed was to repent and believe
and be faithful and give yourself.

That’s not really hard if you never happen to
not know your sin or whiff at air or be betrayed or
fail to be gotten. At least something else is, though.
There’s a girl I spot I would like to ****. She is
attractive from where I’m standing, flirty I can
tell, leering at me and gossiping with another

cute girl. If I happen to meet her after the service,
I’d like not to have to say much to get her in bed.
That way, there isn’t the risk of exhaustion or
feeling pointless from trying to tell so much.
But that is always going to be hard. That is why
I’ll stop sometimes, just chew the bread.

The patient has had no nausea,
vomiting or back pain. No chills,
fatigue, fever, decreased vision
or double vision. No ear drainage
or hearing loss, epistaxis or
runny nose. No sore throat, calf
pain, chest pain, cough or difficulty
breathing. No pedal edema,
palpitations, black stools, ******
stools or constipation. No diarrhea,
urinary frequency, laceration, skin
rash or depression. No dizziness,
headache, head injury, weakness
or enlarged lymph nodes. All
systems negative        

and yet

the way an
unknown part of my stomach once
vellicated on the surface, a
quick burst, single series of
three waves—(I could even
count them)—troughs, crests, passing

the point of kiss (or dream), a
peristalsis veering off course and plunging
(up or down, in this
there is no orientation) to an unexpectedly
known place (likely another one) and I,
seeming strangely uncomfortable. Or

perhaps just light, the way it rippled
just once, one time
off the glass of an opening door, skidded
across the passing wraith that was
one of my shimmering hopes—but no, it
is more the way

the universe sounds outside of
the window, as it is still
being born again and stupendously being also
dying again. The way I am
too leaden or cloyed to shuffle feet,
throw open that calico drape.

I paid for the two coffees and brought
them back to the table, swear they
chinkled in my hands like the music
in my teeth jouncing around when I
see you. You wrote letters in your
bright notebook and as I sipped you
asked me to discover them. High task.
Could barely read your cursive boughs
and sinewy slippery esses, slip slip
sliding off the page as you smiled
with a pixieish shrug—see, can’t do it.
But I sipped a little more deliberately,
slitted my eyes back to you, wrote
you some mischief on a napkin and
you laughed. It was buoyant and I
floated for a second above the wooden
bench, sustained by other voices like
cushions of marzipan I could dip in
your coffee and you would love it.

And back then you were really in
front of me, I should have limned your
lines and ridges onto your notebook,
just to show you. Should have taken
out my camera in a way you wouldn’t
have seen and taken a picture of those
eyes, the way you looked right there,
right then. Maybe you’d have seen
mine being created then—suddenly
rushing, flushing blood to a created
thing, made out of thin air, substantive.
Seen how you gave me my flesh, how
you made me an unknown drinker of
all life’s subtle blessings, peacefully,
even while within the mist of its
peaceless ecstasy and fury.

the truth is that the truth is that
the truth is that
the truth

I

Happiness—that light
light, that full breath, that
essence in essence

is beyond me

Within—possible—it is me,
is always,
what I could be forever
and so

is beyond me

Only to be lived
when I am past, when life
has truly gone

beyond me

II

Is what is full, is whole—
all of all
conceivabilities, which absorb
all and take in all
like a first breath, breathing
everything—the wild message in
feeling and being and vitality
of animals and plants and millions
of multiplying, tremulous cells,
as in husks and surfaces and
shimmeringly naked landscapes
efflorescing,

coming all
to culminating breathlessness,

and skin of new life,
sublimely sheathed in
lighted glass, in the mist of
a beatific cry shedding
in pure air, in pure light,
firm like the rock
of distant morning mountains,

to the glistening above
of a night pond touched only under,
to the rush and song of a river echoing
blood and centuries and the stillness
of change

to the taste of fruit upon a starved
tongue, to the despair

of solitude—
and the wrenching bliss of solitude—

to the hot red of a wound
and the womb,

of shame, and longing, and lips and again,
the despair—

of again—of despairing—of again
despairing at the misery of
the truly doomed, at the existence
of despair and misery and truthless doom
within existence, at the possibility of
unbearableness, and losing breath
finally again

III

I cannot, will not, and never will
bear this wondrous inconceivability—
True if true happiness
is not mine to be borne

It is

beyond me so in me

that somewhere I am

beyond

Yet I actually did love.
And what was my love?
I, for whom love was
the mystery itself,
supposed to be
always just
out of reach, did love,
and did love that love,
the love I hoped
to miss as love,
loving too much
the love I sought
to love as love.
Had it really been
the love just
unreachable,
that still, somehow,
had been mine? Yes it
must have been, I
did love, must have loved,
even if it was
love fallen
just out of reach of love,
if ever the love
had been my love.
My love?
Oh and what a
twisting and
twisting
mordantly
lovely glass stair-
case of a love
it is.

is its ending.

I could and would want,
if what is behind me is truly nothing,
if these words stop lying and untangle me,
to fall backward, away from
this circle of attempt.

But then (God) how deep I would fall!
without meaning, inside coiling time.
So again I find myself having to try,
writing helplessly
another repetition.  

Just the act is enough (for a while, uncoiled).
But it’s not enough. What can I do?
My written bursts are always
muted in some kind of murk
or otherwise obscuring clarity,
and they press their beautifully soiled hands
against concrete windows,
knowing they will (and must) stay
for another while, at least,
tearfully inside.

The beginning of it is a slow
burdensome churn to widen cracks.
The rest is a ritual for the politely deranged:
******* what little air seeps out of the real,
chafing what little skin I have
(all of which is a little fearful)
with what few rays of medicine light
are handed to me across the cracks
from the real.

It is a ritual (in essence)
to unstifle the strayed confusion I impart
to the in-between two childs,
who blurry, alone, and accepting, fly together
in the midst of this ever-widening green field.

“We should go back to our home
on top of an overturned dust bin,
where I can toss sand in the air and laugh
because I don’t care to know beyond,”
I hear her say to the other.

I imagine my love as this child,
make the hidden screen in front of her past
young eyes coalesce gently
into this hidden now-and-everything.

I see you collect rocks safely
into your pink-striped shirt
as dirt stains your purple pants.
The color of your young hair is the same
it was when I saw it reflected in the
Tyrrhenian, before we reached our ripped end
and you made me fall backward,
somersaulting with eyes closed in sickness
toward the sun we saw that day,
in the garden we agreed was perfect.

All of which is said or done
Is lost within, tangled ‘****
Thick and thin of branching trees,
Stifled by the leaked white noise,
Racing, growing, crackled voice
Yelling all of it could be.

I don’t recognize you, but you’ve returned, oh it
must be you. No one else comes here but you.

Do you remember this music?

Kaleidoscopically gemmed it repeats, perhaps too
delicately—a quiet, tinkling knell, fishtailing through the
glimmering rain—mauve—soft-soaping the soil to darker clumps
beneath—soppy—slowly sinking so pretty, yet
terrifying now you’ve stepped into and through each
silted deepness, holding time.

This music begs you still—it has not stopped begging since—
to step further inside the wet loam (You clutch time now.)
To press down on it, in it, and listen tender the key you touched in
life between moments. It’s the reason you’ve returned.

You won’t, it’s not music, this feels like a baby’s head you’re on, you
cringe. About to cry.

Again, I’m sorry, but you have to—you have to feel it
scarily give a little. Feel it sink, infolding inside-out through its
thin pleura overflowing, always overflowing with the visceral
sap of everything on it—(I mean really everything.)—this
glistening ick, this frog-soil—moist, sickly cloying, susceptible
almost to light. And breathing.

It’s about to give out under your feet.

And kaleidoscopically gemmed it repeats, can you hear it?

Yes, you could be stepping on all their naked lungs, but there’s
nothing to fear, it’s an eternal field of their lungs—pink and gasping—
and that’s all there is here.  

Feel with your foot, like me. Is it alive? Or is it life? Listen, it
bleats a note. Why so sweet if, by touching it, we’ve made it drip
first truth from its tongue, look!—the blood of its eyes’ red
rivulets. Of its heart. The slightest breach it was. Barely an
opening

I’m sorry. I don’t mean to force you. If I was only me, I’d
leave it be, so it could spare us the look at the inner red that yokes
flesh to spirit. But you arrived here, and—listen, now it’s been
done, do not close your eyes.

You didn’t want to see this, I know—the sticky gum or muck that
licks over the fibrous bridges. Keeps them glued down and
invisible in the other world. It is all much better when the mucilage
does not ooze out. When the form is skin-tight, because that’s how
it works best. Without you probing its pores.

But now do you see, probing its pores, what you may find?
Look. Now do you see why the music has begged you?

What rests underneath there—what you may find in that dark
indigo clay which the shamans dug and pressed over their
blackened eyes in the night-trances—glows transparent somehow.
In pulses. Like Aurelia, the silver moon jelly.

Now it is just within your reach.

Light would pour to the other side, and their mouths would stiffen
with several infinite unintelligible syllables remaining stuck there
under their tongues. As it poured, they felt their blood replaced
in a surge with veinless essence, which sustained in its flow
through them something of precarious beauty—ascending, swirling
itself in air, then back into again, again returning to the home of homes
within them.  

The silver-moon-jelly-clay is continuously poised on the tip
(of not being clay).
About to break into splendor, into finally birth-giving of real breath.
Of meaning to breath, and to breathing.

This is what feeds, unknowing to them in that world, their field of lungs.
But you will know instantly when you feel it, that by feeling
(in feeling)
you have really always known.

Did you reach for it? Did you feel it in that second? You did not, I see
(you were so close!)
for now we’ve passed the origin symmetry and are sinking up! Going
deeply back up through the sticky goop with red glue in our hair,
through the moist-frog-ick-soil, choking dirt again, squishing loam
with our heads, shooting upward like falling, hearing lungs, and now
out, atop the surface again, in this bare garden that grows only under.

The skies above, still mauve, and the rain lips quietly the same
melody which, kaleidoscopically gemmed, repeats. It was all as quick as
nothing.

And, as I look at you, I see you’ve already forgotten
everything.

And now you’re leaving me! Fading back through the spectral
break in the clouds, whoever you were. Whoever it is you became.

I did honestly believe this was to be that one moment when, together,
we’d finally get to touch it. Press it like real sun to our blackened
eyes. I cannot tell you, it has felt like the one each time.

But I know to wait. I can wait. In this world I keep fluttering hope
in my hand. And you, whoever you’ll be, will return here.
You always do.
Do you ever remember why?
It’s because, when you leave through the clouds to go back to
that world, you are still. Always.
Clutching time.

I was just the summer to you.
Just the easy bloom and
the easy blue and
easy heat.
I was only the flowers that
opened to you
as you walked, a light sundress,
delicately, tenderly,
the grace of your thighs
warmly anticipating
the tender youth full
brightening day.
I was
the colors sidling nicely  
in flitting spots along
the periphery of living life
like lavender, cerise, and
cerulean smiles
blushing,
the dripping
geraniums and chamomile
sprinkling you with
fondness, that
dote upon you
adoringly
and would even
ingratiate themselves for you.
I was the kiss only of
a sensible sunlight, the
embrace of a
quick breeze, and
your pleasant thought
of your legs
knee-deep in your ocean’s
cupped hands
to cool for a day
your flushed skin
in turquoise, swirling coolly
salt fresh.

Will someone be
your four seasons ever?
Will someone be
the cold silence too,
of a winter that can keep you
staring lucid and glazed by
a fire?
Will someone be
the frost
that nips your skin to remind you of
the fire
in your own skin?
Will someone ever be
the color of fallen
leaves spread over a
hidden field like
a hidden retreat
of dreaming flowers
before waking
ever?
Or the snow
before it releases
itself
as moving water
resting
upon the yearning bud
before it
releases from itself
promise

Down a hilled road, overlooking
The high lift sunlit watered land

The rest moves and I stay

The windows are softly jarring
Bathed in leaks of this wine dusk
Behind graying street trees
Speaking tired and wisely
As I walk home.

The sounds unwrap inside
Out of darkness. A drone,
Artificial creation, a family
Of starving happy insects,
My feet placed carefully
On these birds’ earth.

The rest moves

And suddenly I have fallen into
Something of your eyes again
Walking home, knowing death again
Spinning in its nauseating peace
There and not. Holding only
What is bearable in my lungs
Of the view, the other homes, so far
Under the same light.

You have gripped even my dusk.
No, it has been my dusk
Wanting to grip you.
For I have always stayed here

You have always moved

I will enjoy listening
To the sound of
Starving happy insects tonight.

Or how can we?

Seems to be
the same headwind
against which we must
surge
or accept being
broken by,
continue crawling against,
until, in hope,
it shifts

and we go
with it,
together,
towards.

you don’t see
say much
says much

and more

elsewhere.

You can witness something
miraculous. You can witness

me

unreflected.



Let me explain.


You can witness something
miraculous. You can witness

me

unreflected.


I  cannot.

Nothing wavers ahead
like steam on narrow horizon road.
Perhaps it is the now dying spirit
of a world no longer in heat,
my one chance in spring
lost carelessly in the slightest
wisp of a moment’s hand,
the hopeful rising flowers
in my lungs blanched by the
weight of what I’ve made
memory mean, of yesterday’s
sun, and shrinking.

I should have said nothing. I’m sorry.

Your movements wanted to belong.
But inside you cringed when I spoke like that.
I did not know then that you loved only the thought.  

For me, there was strength in a few thrown leaves.
Like playful snow to your face.
I took the bus home
With signs already drawn in my eyes.

After many blanket nights
Together in fountain water,
You spoke to me of emptiness.
I took it as mine—I’m sorry—and replied
I am like you.

I will no longer see you.

But I summon your skin easily.
I lay you beside me, and with grazing hands
try again to show you all of what my fields
look like, in the setting of my sun.

I imagine the feelings under your skin.
I make them how I need, this time.

You are walking my fields with me
And I am silent.

The sea reeds brush against the gentleness of your legs.
There is a lightness in your chest.
And your summer dress rests like fallen mist,
so peacefully on your glow.

May beauty rot.
Is this what I want to say?
Perhaps not.

May my desire for beauty rot.
Would this be sound to say?
Perhaps not.

May everything be beautiful
so there is not
that harsh glaring
lack of.
Is this what I’ve been
trying to say?
Not even
sort of.

But you get the picture.

C’mon, man.

:morbidly urgent
whisper:

C’mon.

(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.

Dead leaves are colorful,
aren’t they?
laying like a frozen dance
atop the dewed staves
were seen every day
waiting below.

Dead leaves gave their bodies
to the upward aching hands
of a graying yard this morning.
Dead leaves were tranced in
the whole apparition
this morning.

The sun made snow falls
frailly through mist on my
friable face.
Am I an old man, already?
I don’t ask if it’s the change
made them fall. I don’t ask—
I know.
Time breeds wisdom
and also Alzheimer’s.
But it doesn’t matter, we’ve
learned to laugh at Woody Allen
movies, after all,
haven’t we?
Dead leaves are colorful,
aren’t they? Aren’t we?

Cope, hope, or catharsis, one
may be forced to choose one
during the bouts

of restraint against release,
of reach before the sigh,
of desire, to control instinct.

Of all inevitability,
daring to call itself proudly by name
on this mercilessly constant tread

of experiencing, each it seems
with a collapsing and rising unique,
Planck’s momentous, memoried,

voice-blanking frames, slightly
shifting and forming (together
we conjecture) the same blurred image

of light, of looking,
of a thought, of a chance,
that maybe,

whether it is instrumentalist hands
or a playerless orchestra bestowing
sound, of granules grinding

over each other, with each
a glance, a lift of a hand,
in disguise of louder music,

that I cannot say is wrenching, that I
cannot say is strident, or sweet or
harmonic or agreeable—just heard somehow,

resonant,
seemingly against silence,
at the seeming heart—

that the note might be
the only one to hope for,
as cope with, as cathect oneself in.

The only one channel to that which,
if heard, will really be heard.
Not a down, then in, then up,

and out, uncertain.
Not a fading with time
or a never heard at all

except for mere murmurings
of chance. Though don’t shrug them.
Be exposed, undeniably, wholly, to them.

These, musicless, can become
still air, still flesh—mystery’s shut mouth.
Something of a mouthless bird.

If only I had heard the words themselves
expelled unmistakably in blades from
a swirling voice, prismatic in black,
and      simply      inescapable permanence
through me, saying
you are condemned, I would have nodded, nodded

Unmistakable, too, though, is my thought
and it lashes      simply      through me
more than a burden      on a via dolorosa
asking what sound the ground would make,
were my shoulder to dip, it to fall, were I, in bareness,
to run towards a break in the confluence

My shoulder throbs critically certain moments,
possibly, the way water when it mantles
under itself, when its skin just about
feels      itself      out
Though solitude, it could be made of wood
to splint or splinter and, further, throbbing is just

blood, in as would be out, so      quickly do my
bones straighten, wait for swirls to slow,
silence to recede back towards
sussurating laodicean voices, again, speaking
only to me, too      too clearly      a calloused truth,  
and for the confluence to nod, nod      then close the break.

I am sorry, love. I am only man.

For you, how I wish I could be more than man.

But I am not. I am only
flesh         only words.

Words that glean of something other
than flesh, but still, you hear only
      words.

You cannot perceive anything else of me.

So look within yourself, love!
What do you feel? How do you feel

this?

That, of me,
      you can perceive.

I walk to the newsstand over
blue gray cobblestone jumping up
my soles, the windows of
every mother in Viterbo
looking at my swaying arms,
at the very reason I love

the squint of eyes in morning sun.

Because I am free from anticipating  
a slow sinking earth, hung twined,
hung taut, hung thin, hung dried,
peeling off the body like
scree, relenting.  

Because I am ten.

From five lire scrunched in a fist, from
a father’s request for Il Messaggero,
steps can brim with direction, with place,
with an appetence for growing
a grown man would lunge at.
Could make a mute anchorite sing again
to an unsacred sky: “a son is a son as
a song is a song, this is that I am

is why I belong.”

I walk to the newsstand
under glaring windows, under
the look of all Viterbo’s mothers,
under the sluice of morning sun
that piques the eyes as sliced brine,

and the stand is shuttered.
Dirt metal slats I touch once
to make sure, and then I walk
straight back, back with the sun now
behind, illuminating stone, in front of me.

Once I’d said to myself,
I was already gone      too far,
so, resigned, I said: just keep an offering
of that music,      (you know it, please)
that particular
pull, the natural
vertigoed clench, leaping of mountains
feeling, in your nervous system, can
travel at the speed of light when
you walk (do you see the motion
captured, the blinking lamps of
empty highways, your limitless
imperialectric nanoarchitexture? Please)

or when you remember walks      when,
on days, flying, those months turned
each in distinct color, each of
particular scent (March
the showered fruit breeze of her hair,
August her skin drunk sweet in
coconut rays, November smoked from
a candle left after dinner, pressed black
fabric, a woven clathrate dress, the bed
before you kissed her face,
before you’d said too much.)

Then there is the kind thinning
of longing, the palliated sigh of being
gently put to sleep after time lived
inuring joys.
That clings to all past. That is
the sediment of time.
You will surely know a day music will fail,
will give you only half breath,
when you’ll need one whole.
And upon that time, I will no longer
pull you      you will have to push yourself
free off a crumbling rock.

To a new globe of shadowy truth,
we turn off the bedroom light,
puff the softening cloak out first with
our arms, our legs, our stretched-out-naked toes,
our instinctive bliss swelling, and then—
with our spirit! our night! with the spirit of nights
out of our chest, with our laughter! drifting across the
black sea, under black skies, through the
sweet-skin-salted black breeze that flows in the unknowing
black immensity of our comfortably hushed eyes. Like us
now our voices finally float—rafted but enraptured
on soothing water—awaiting, knowing,
the lighted shore we’ll reach tomorrow.

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.

The wave is the way
a dance makes water stay;
a laugh that walks through hills
astray. The path that laid the course,
now still.

But again, it breaks! With arms
and flailing legs they spray
and spatter it about on the
hot concrete. They spit and
shout and jump and swim
and ****** my way
a million little knives that cut
the sun, it hurts my eyes.
They laugh
a laugh that sinks the drowning
and smothers their voice with cold wrinkly fingers
so they quit singing,
begin mouthing.

Go jump in, you silly goose!
You’re supposed to swim in swimming pools!
Here, grab a towel and some slippers too.

I walk along the spots of wet,
left by those who were soaked and drenched
as they came and went, came and went.
The waves they made were sloppy, yes
but smiles, too, can be like this.

So I don’t know why
my toes gripped the edge when
my eyes saw me in my clear reflection.

We live to reproduce
the one inside the nothing,
the circle within without,
to survive, in any way,
the flesh-ripping teeth,
the fear of blood and of pain,
the fall and the scream and the tears—
we live to try surviving it all
with the eternal hope in us
that death has never lived,
and that life, this true love
will never die.

My grandmother’s fragility sinks under the blanket
like a ship on its final voyage, when it becomes sea.
I picture this as she sips sugar water with parted lips.
I watch her in silence from a small, faraway room
because the door is slightly ajar, and there enters a light
from her window that comes to rest humbly on her pale eyes.

I start to wonder what they must be thinking, her eyes,
as they begin to close, slowly, and lashes become blankets.
Do they fear the heavy, trespassing breath of darkness that smothers light?
Or do they smile and find comfort from the warm sea
of prayers that wash up on the shore of her room
and carry with their waves the whispers of my silent lips?

My mother ambles through thick air, talks with dry hushed lips
to her sister, who understands. My mother’s eyes
wander like sad gusts into the emptiness of my room.
They tell me she wants to bundle me in a blanket,
place me in a basket, and let me float away with the sea
until I become the constant water of her veins, pure and light.

Tired minutes pass, and the sun is coming down; the light
that had rested on my grandmother’s eyes now sleeps on her lips.
The glowing sun reflects in my face, and the sea
in the sky changes wistfully from a sad red to a soft orange, like the eyes
of my mother, as she sits next to her and strokes her blanket.
With the dimming of day, I begin to feel colder in my faraway room.

My sister sits down with me on the couch, but there is no room
so I rise and walk out the door, moving towards the light
that silks through the window and trickles onto her blanket.
My feet make no sound and my breath waits patiently behind lips
as I see my mother, her solemn eyes
more profound than the deepest sea.

I look at my grandmother as she floats in the sea.
Blue water enters under the crack of the door and fills the room.
It starts at my ankles, rises to my neck, and stops just below the eyes.
I see my grandmother sail and sink like a light
ship on her last voyage. The water kisses her with blue lips
and embraces her in a warm blanket.


In my room I put on a blanket because I am cold like the sea.
Light has fallen, and my glass eyes
crack like the tremor of lips.

How fine is the crystal
of the palace which you ponder!
Upon the weight so parlously,
suppose it’s what you conjured?
Luscious silk to kiss the skin
to smooth away the semblance.
Chandeliers that shimmer
from the ceilings of the breathless.
True passion in the luster
of all satisfied desires.
And a spark in that center
of that sentimental fire—

Mighty fine, I say,
long’s you hide me,
all the mirrors
where the glance really falls
    eyed glint bouncing off
lubricous rocked walls, in cavernous darkness
from just moonlight
our moonlight.

You cannot see me but     I am
Somewhere           Underneath
The surface      Just underneath
About to break       Always still
Just            Barely           Under      
A gilded barege of light  Shifts    
Liquid leaves in gouache   Fall    
Trinkling             Over my face.

Don’t believe the sign
that is clawed from another’s cave
of a silly heart, onto some door
in some beautiful garden on a special day.
That scraped shine, that which
opens wide the view for you
and you remember as a sharp, etched
slowly focusing glaze on your time
was probably made with some key
of some fool who regrets it now, no doubt,
as you do.

Nor should you believe another’s photograph of it
and take it as yours, or the same,
and think that this is what you were going
to write your book about, one day, all along.
That book was full of naïve wonders
and melodies you paid too much attention to, anyway.
So just allow what you love the most
to be scrapped and substituted.
Words are just words, you see.

So what do you believe?
The motionless things of a winter walk, I suppose.
They are the kindest.
They know not to talk to you, not to say anything
you could possible believe.

I ask—I know,

but did I? pull you close only
only
to keep from flying away?

I once knew I cupped your head,
like water, to my lips.

I think I know now, hauntingly,
I might have wrenched your face to mine
like a ravenous and terrified animal
and kept on your lips but to seal my mouth,
a stormy vacuum,
that ****** ceaselessly the breath of too much
                  in the attempt to inhale one.

****** dry, it became nothing.

Still, it could not be helped.
Meaning would be given to the thoughtless
and its name—passion—would be answered,
its sweet breath ****** on.
But I
I never breathed anything.
And yet there was more sustaining my life.
What sweet did I taste? Its breath or
the more?

You would rename it—silly—to yourself.
You did not know you whispered it to me always.
I only heard it when our cover would
slit briefly open—painfully, and inevitably.
Your breath in these thin moments was bitter, bitter
to you too.
So we covered the slits and sealed the gape,
told ourselves we knew
all the clothes were off, together, for a reason.
Convinced ourselves we were really touching what was untouchable,
for a reason.

But, if since the very beginning
your mouth was to move that way,
was to say those words—and if your eyes were always
going to look like autumn trees and unsay them—
was it for one or wasn’t it?
Is there something at all to smile about
just passing through our geometry?

I ask this to myself—of course. But,
but
today’s sun blades the sky too much like yesterday’s!
So your eyes return! They return to reach! to pull me out to free fields
as they used to.
Your sundress still sparks an Aztec flame
as the colorless crowd ashes.
To me your scene is still an answer
and your breath can still warm truth
as sweet as tragedy on my skin.

The lining of homes around me
glints light red
and I stare at its light, after you,
your cutting rays,

because your thought of ending
now kisses mine
and so—still—I can answer

whether, as I am now— you were always
only a memory.

If I live long enough, I’m told
I will see the annihilation as simple
as the blink of a bubble.

That annihilation I wished
would have surprised me the time
I fed my starvation
with sandwiches in an empty café,
television sputtering clearly static voices,
me staring
at mute moving mouths.

That annihilation I wished
while standing tall, taller than my father,
as a hovering smile on his shoulders above
a triumphant green field.
When he gave me the thumbs up, it
searched me and found me
in that confused, relieved haze of ecstasy,
breathing on me like a love, whispering
“everything was okay for me
and it will be for you.”

I sit now watching moving people,
feeling the fibers in my limbs
suddenly stiffen like taut strings tied to
beyond the chair, beyond the floor
and beyond the earth that made this place
appear here, now, out of infinite possibilities.
I sit and watch faces, their strange parts,
gingerly realize all of mine, and struggle
to laugh off the fear that they are moving
(and I am laughing)
from something called instinct.

I can’t help imagining
the universe that sees me annihilated
this very second.

I wonder where I’ve really been.
I wonder where my remains have gone.

I remember when I was six there
was a hint of it
even then.
I was six.

Six and already acting as if!
trying to catch a setting sun.

As if
a last apricot
snapped of its thin, pendulant
node, were falling into
abscission, and the pulp, and the flame
orange  
flesh, and the
seeds
about to rupture.

Would lay an open hand, one hand
(I think my right)—lay it on
the frail bark of a tree
outside, together, alone. As if
even then
asking the skin
of what rises and holds
organic and tall the
living and strong
not to peel away
leave me.

As if I thought
I don’t know who was beyond,
watching.

But laid it there, still, all popely
and saintly and, really, quite foolishly.
I was six.

Six, and wondered,
had somebody
watched?

I don’t remember what I wanted.
But a trace of something
important
remains
ruptured in me. As if

all along I had known
not to hold out the hands. Known

I am six-teen years later.