Before falling it swells disclike and becomes splendid;
all the poisoned oils and drab colours strained away
and replaced over by bright, blonde yellows like cups of light.
Before breaking, the connection between the fruit and branch
grows twice as strong and in the final seconds before decay
a scent runs across the tree that the seed knew well, before forgetting.

That’s the strange part:

in the act of transformation
no desires can be taken
from old state to new state.

Either we abandon
even the impulse to exit to the shell
or we ourselves will never leave it.

Think of it:
grey Kansas with its headlong wind
broken once by barn doors laying on their side and then
unbroken for miles and free riding through frozen, standing
grass. A cathedral with purple walls— somehow subterranean
though above the ground— where men cage-dance to each
other’s angles but do not glance the paid for swells they make
in mirrors, glasses, countertops; in eyes and brainstems like a burn

and something scopophilic in the soul gears in to what is seen
but not to what exists; how actors in even outstanding erotica report
the lack of desire they feel while watching their own play reel back; how they
are not the moans or counter-moans; the sounds of kissing or the glinting
looks that pass between performers as a cue or like those cubic lanterns master
calligraphers spend a month adorning with a dozen of their favourite poems
only to set a light inside them; to watch them rise with heat and frazzle
to trails of ember in the air.

What’s dead that still
drives action?
From the graveyard I heard  
mallards fighting in the green pond.
Stinging flies following  
roads through barks of lime.
On a grave a notice had been taped.
My wife is under this stone, it read,
I promise you, you won’t graffiti it
more times than I can clean it.