The unwelding of us was reverberating
and time was heat even then. Though
I feel its waves only now—a stretching

of full air, an enchanted scraping
of flimsy tied veins, these boats
poorly moored to moving docks

never moving water.
Then electricity, inflaming suddenly,
and there is a terrific prying apart.

These days, I can sit with the snow ice
spearing down and empty myself of it.
When at least parts pour back in, though,

and I smell the skin you wore in summer
when a wind blows,
restlessness speaks volumes.

I

Whether it is behind and hidden
or bare and in front
the thing itself makes me stir
every single day.

Because I am a secret thing
myself.
Here, I can feel my skin, feel the feel,
and still not discover the thing
discover me.

And when one has lost his visions
(back to where those things came)
he cannot make himself out of these either
anymore.

So he lifts upon his shoulder
a thing unknown. Deemed
unbearable.
Spends his days trying to
make amends for things that are
long closed, blackened and
irretrievable.
Continuously falls in love
again with
the occurrence of them
their beginnings and their endings.

II

But there is no painless way to leave
this thing, marked in your voice and birth
and name.

And if I were to write you a poem
about this thing, it would be just a
river of questions, crashing upon
a skull desirous to melt and flow at last
with it—wherever, till whenever.

And yet
there actually is a thing called a sun
that is not an idea in a sky but
a star in a space
of burning gases, exploding and slowly
extinguishing itself, next to us, too.

III

Soon I will know gravity,
become its acceleration. Become the pull
of all things into each other.

IV

Eventually
we all forget why we cried about this thing.
For yesterday could have been years ago.
And tomorrow you could be just about to
die, reaching forward, done waiting, those final
moments.
But today is today. Now will always be now.
And is
is only.

At which point we cry again
overwhelmed now
with very different tears, by the very same
thing.

The matter is that the matter is that
breaking from the constant that is
breaking from the constant that is
constantly breaking constantly

patterns into even patterns into even
language of odd symmetry in the
language of odd symmetry in the
symmetrical language symmetrically

recreated again and recreated again and
seeping from what is unobservably
seeping from what is unobservably
unobserved seeping unobservably

over layers folding over layers folding
the matter over the foldings over
the matter over the foldings over
folding matter folding.

When God created this piece
He must have done so in a quick
stream of blazing consciousness.
He knew it was genius. He knew
it was brilliant—unlike anything
that had ever existed. (Some say
it was this piece, in fact, that
created existence). But like many
artists, He must have been moved
by the ineffable within him, for
it seems not even He knows
what the Hell he was trying to
do, what the Hell he was trying
to convey. The piece remains
a mystery to the artist himself.
Even more the mystery to Him
than to His gawking audience
that has gawked at it for millennia.

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.

What flush of cold distortions shivered the shapes,
became lambent eye waves,
at last?
Skewed the eversince subtly-skewed-already  
            that’s in the light?      Or the cubed      mundane disguises?
like:
the wall’s edges, your desk’s corners, the dead fullness of
strewn ecru pages [crepitating by the open garage door, a breeze]
showing all your rustled struggle, wrestled with, agelessly, and the boxed
form of it—your books—upturned, but floored—

or maybe, all that shook was your sorrowful shoe, its face—
dejected
on its side,
final ***** lace limp on the bottom, below you,
to go with you no more. No more movement
anymore.

Was it, then, unskewed?

And had it always been there at the thick of your throat, had it just
been the tongue in the way, spoiling? Was everything in the world you saw
small then big, too big then small, like
a ****** mouthing of out then in, a throbbing, grabbling of you—
couldn’t tell if the biting was harmless, playful teeth?

You’d say no to me, to all of this, and think maybe. Was it the maybe?

C’mon, man.

:morbidly urgent
whisper:

C’mon.

What are you
trying

to do, buddy??

::his
eyes being
pulled up by
the fragile question
as two
wounds
opening
glisten::

What

are you trying

to do?

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?

This blancmange of dusk—of melted coral lights
has tugged the softest from the heaviest of heights.

Its face the color of yearning—cast down as mine.

Barely grazed round the head I must be bound inside
the verge again—between what now may be moving
and what has immovably since

the frozen wavescape of circumference undefined.

I’ve been wanting to be touched by a light
such as this, but even urge when satisfied
really quells nothing much—just like
a tender eye lightly daubed in steady brine;

a song I play with passion that never will be mine;

the way I shuffle them, without one
to settle on; the silence that I usually find—
the kind that settles none.

Twilight shows me faint—the wait being time

we pine for clear desire—beyond this lacquered  
veneer of sky—vaguely painting fire.

The big bang was your conception.
The expansion of nutritive gases and stars
filled the womb of your pregnant mother.
As barely an earthed fetus, you seemed an animal.
As a newborn, you grew primitively, slowly rose.
Enlightenment when you came of age
to discover yourself human.
Now, in your Twenty-First, the century
of drugged science, you live like a half-god
in ever-questioning evolved reversion,
in a contradictory asylum of paralyzing speed,
rising steep to its ringed peak funneling fumes
that revive the smell of your instincts, primal and fiery.
Then, in one final breath, in the outpour
on volcano’s point, melting and bursting
in radial gasps once again, will come your death
in a matter of ours, the eschaton, a new bang
desired and conceived anew, so that in rebirth
will be your survival, in rebirth our continuity.

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 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?

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.

There are some days many poems
begin themselves in me, and I am
given many first lines.

They come fast those days, and I
have to catch them as they rise
like a thousand geysers

shooting up from a vast barren land
(in shards of what could be held
in the hands) before leaving as

child’s balloons. I do not catch them
all, I do not even catch many. I
manage to touch just a

few. Still I am thankful for those
days. On those days I can feel the
ground shake from their rising,

the ground underneath, whence
they came. The tremor and pulse,
whence I came.

There is a corridor that has escaped
and is out and is cold
and is overlooking Clarkson avenue.
That much I know for sure.

Because I turned
the cold brass ****
of the cold steel door,
heard the wind bellowing
obscenities as it absconded
berserkly. (I think
the other way.)
And also
walked through.

My mother’s voice has been
droned out by electronic
waves tentacling the immediate
space around me, around her,
and everywhere in between.
She sounds like a strange

robot, made-up. By me?
By God? It doesn’t matter.
Because that is
what is heard now.
That voice telling me with
the tragic kindness of
a mother
that I’ve forgotten
to call her, and my
dad, and my
sister,

and how come, have I
been busy?
How is life treating you?
Pretty good, I say. What’s
new? Nothing. Well then
what’s pretty good
about it, she says.
I laugh, she laughs too,
and I laugh again, inside though,

differently.
Slowly, our voices
wind down and we say
quiet goodbyes so that
I feel ice
about to rush to my
nose, it’s tentative, it
stops, and I
hang up the phone.

I am on the 6th floor of
a sick house, a hospital,
where some are healed,
some die, and others
stay sick. On the
ground, hundreds of feet
down and away
there are people I think, they
look so

small. An obese
mother, probably with
diabetes or hypertension or
heart disease or all of it
together, pushing her
baby in a carriage. A
smoker alone smoking
away something I’m
glad I don’t know and
other people just walking,
moving, like small living

things and then
I look down, closer,
at my own hands growing.
They can be
so large
when they move to
slowly cover
eyes.

I
Thin scales of self dry my waters
murky-lit flakes      mackled mirrors      

tilt slightly only because shaken
by silent throes      invisible current

(to swimming’s orchestra, I’ve been deaf)

latch onto nothing but fish-bone      
fish-meat under      latch and tilt
      cold      iridescent      like hot slaps

II
A native child      alone goes fishing
names me yen      (“the hologram fish”)

yen, sparkling, becomes
his first catch      his first glory and pride

Which way must yen be tilting then
in the sun?      for him to unhook the gaff
see yen soak, see yen drip      brazen
against an impossible smaragdine sky      air      
and toss it back     back to water?

III
Having gasped for it      maybe
I should not be that easily set free
I am human only like yen      craving out
of maddening iridescence            

but it’s a mean trick, child
to lift me in that air like something
      miraculous      and then toss me back

A tilt in the sun must be made to last   I know
a glint      some air briefly on the scales    
a fish, a yen      must then go back to swim
with itself      more clearly in its waters

Oh how I’m glad to have seen you at last!
At least to have seen my inscrutable belief
flash once in the flesh, rushing intense  
like the coming to be of an immemorial dream.
Your look towards me called forth my sea
and shook its floor of live ships that’ve dwelled
too long on the forgotten, spiritless bottom,
so that they rose again to breathe their sails.

But sure enough it was just one! One breath to live.
Just one to hold above because there was just one to give.
I wonder if they’ll remember that still clear sun.
The whole out of the blue before it moved and shuddered
under the fickle ripples as they bowed out and sunk.
To return to the mud where the yearnings are stuck
while the purpose still lies on the surface to be touched.

Oh, if I had not seen you! My ocean still would be.
With no billows to unsettle the pellucidity.
And my ships, they could have seen the bright light of the beam
through will alone at home at the bottom of the sea.
But now? To watch the light, remember heat, to feel the cold—
It’s all the same when the dream’s untold!
But I’ll listen to the silence and endure not knowing I’ll survive,
if you promise to forever give me that culminating smile.

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

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