chain lightning blows across the sky like a radiant touch;

strikes the same tree in my hometown every time i fall in love.

what breed is it, this ruinous love? striking,

the white caustic light of it irradiating

the surrounding cornfields.



were you ever there to see it? from your bedroom window?

the arc and crackle? this tuning fork of astral flame resonating

between cloud and timber? this crippled elm where

my skinny suicidal teenage love bid me scale limbs?

where each time, like a surgeon, my shaky fingers stitched bark

with the corded sinew of raccoons and my fluids held it all glued?

in the dark? how so like an heirloom it seems now;

this lone tree, cordoned in scars,

all gnarl and char.



i turn to the map of my circulatory system in these moments,

follow the red army over a causeway of capillaries,

watch them fattened on oxygen.

how else to know that amongst all this,

there remains

a richness deep

down things?



make a supple leather from the hides

of the nights I knuckled crabapples down your roof.

It will be the color of a bruise; of a secret. all you do

is carve, slicing carefully to cut out my

silhouette projected against your bedroom wall –

all this, time and memory, just arts and crafts. molding

the vectors of us, hurtling through space

like coins drifting

to the bottom

of a well.



memory, the fashion and fashioning of it:

the way we wear our existence. our skeleton

to cobble and clothe. so while we’re at it…

let us forget the moments of trepidation.

Obliterate the clamminess of our palms clenched together,

the schoolyard drama of it all. pasted in layers

until it’s just a mess of glue. until the moments that matter

are traced with dotted lines

and lusted over

by the appetites

of scissors.