On an Ohio vacation, we got the call.
Dressed in a navy t-shirt, and stiff boating shorts
(plucked fresh off a J. Crew shelf just earlier that morning –
        I wanted a darker grey)
My mother and I parked by the open grave.

The visitation was packed with strangers.
Stuffy, suffocating almost – I tugged at the new shorts,
coarse, rough-feeling, no time to break in yet –
        fibers still unset –
My back hugs peeling wallpaper.

My mother's tears stain my shirt, the salt stiffening fresh fabric –
Baptism. Each tear carves fresh wrinkles, crossing her face like rivers,
slicing into her like canyons. Her hands are childlike upon my shirt,
grasping blindly for anything, her vision blurred, her breath short,
her heart broken.

I peer at the uncovered casket and look at the woman's face.
Thin halo of white hair, skin pale like alabaster –
She is stiff. Eyes fixed, blood cold. Her hands clasp tightly.
Her black cardigan holds her like a piece of glass,
stiff, hard, yet so fragile, threatening each second to crack,

and the sounds of its breaking my mother's muffled cries,
and my hand's rhythmless consoling pats upon her back.

My feet are anchors, sinking as I collapse
into your arms; hearth-warmed fabric wraps –
your quiet affection – around us; communication lapses.

No words are needed, for the light fluttering of
our hearts join in subtle chorus, muttering
unutterable truths about love, and suffering.

*

Unutterable truths about love! – and, suffering,
our hearts join in subtle chorus, muttering
"no" – words are needed for the light fluttering of

your quiet affection; around us, communication lapses
into your arms: hearth-warmed fabric wraps.
My feet are anchors: sinking as I collapse.

Another autumn peels forth from the walls, leaving
apple-red strewn over the birdhouse on the front lawn.
I think how you saw this place and said we’d be lucky to live here.

My love, you're never wrong. The porch ceiling shimmers my smoke.
Still, that cough in my spine's getting deeper. Sally said this afternoon: maybe something’s fighting to come out, or be wiped away.

My spliced mind's the concrete that old seed’s entombed with.
My roots grew deep in that road he stuck his knife into,
the one they paved solid and covered thick with white pickets.

If I could go back I would leave a time capsule on that hill
with all our sticks and rocks, in our pinestraw nest in the bushes.
I’d leave something for us I still can’t name.

*

There’s permission in the wind, Sally says: Still, still, to change.
The migrating flock in the sky finds its symmetry as soon as I sense it.

Wait — there was a clarity that day in Virginia before,
when the mountain sang back each leafblown psalm.

Grey solemns stretched their patient palms for miles.
My brother stuck his tongue out, and he giggled like a child.

I hear the voice of the desert --
The wind-swept dunes of barren Deep Springs.
Or the elysian spire Mount Roraima,
Yggdrasil hewn bare by angry gods.

I hear the beckoning call of Alaska! --
The chickadee’s croon from an ice-rimed spruce.
Or the mountains of Maine in the autumn,
Swathes of arboreal flames crunching under my boots.

What does it mean to hunger for something?
What does it mean to leave the beaten path behind?

A plane vanishes beyond the azure horizon.

One day, I plan to be riding it.

I see our future in the spaces between each strand of your hair—
painted pastel pink and baby blue with the brush of a Madaket sunset.
The moon sits quietly in its nook of the heavens, laying stars out
like polaroids—light-year snapshots of time—on the wall around it.

Maybe it's telling, somehow,
that our window into the world around us is built of
hairline streaks of the past, golden wavelengths washing gently
upon this shore at high tide.

All that leads to this—
this moment, the past's collective wisdom
illuminating all that we mean when we touch.

All that leads to this—
the past signaling the future.
We look upon the stars, see all that they have been—

and in their light, all that we are.

In your eyes, all that we can be.

I trace your name in air. Your feet follow
my up-down circle rhythms, steps unsteady,
bearing you fruitlessly into the sky. Like settling,
I bring you back down to earth. You bury yourself
in the crease of my collarbone and neck, joyous
smile sidelong, caught and carved in bas-relief.
Like settling, I bring you back down to earth.
Let you go. I lift you again, and again, tired arms
straining higher, desperate to guard this sculpted ecstasy
from the blunted hammerstrikes of reality. You
ought to see by now that sculptors exist to create
the very moment they strive to preserve.
To shield you and history from what follows:
your feet crashing down, relief cracking to sorrow.

I trace your name in sand. My fingers follow
the gentle curve of the G, twist of the R,
quick-dance of the A. Soft, distant wind
muddles your edges. The grains bury themselves
in the crevices of my fingernails, coarse reminders
of the way my fingers curled like roots in the
forest-green threads of your sweater,
planted somewhere in the soiled recess of my mind.
No matter – it’s all ground to dust now.
The wind breathes your letters into oblivion.
I sweep my palm across the mandala,
green sand mixing to grey. What’s left
spills over, dusts the welcome mat.
My boots still crunch each time I come home.

all the world
emanates from this place –
sun sinking before us

the wind
carries our words to nowhere

the camera catches each twist of you

the dark halo of hair
your laugh blossoming forth
crinkles of your eyes –
awash in honey fire

It’s the full chassis’ hum that kicks a spray to every side.
The ashy harness clutched that bucks,
Shivers, rips coldly into a glide.
Every diversion is a turbulence of concatenate kind,
Shared web trembling waves, each announcing life.

Yes – from the tremor of wind and water to
the heron’s calligraphic precision –
Everything. Everything always moves. Even you,
The machine-rider, throned high.
Keeping dry while streaming sea into sky.

If you dig in your heels and pull wide, you might feel it:
The lurch of your own wake.
Awash in your own life.