next to the dresser i counted one of many minutes.
     a metastasis to twenty and i took it to memory
     her body not even the slightest resistance.
  
after bathing when feet barely dried
      leaves pools, like an admission of something.

i still have next to the sink, a shabby portrait.
     unsheathed its silence, hung by the gate
     by the neighboor as you confessed one
     April afternoon, the heat so tense erasing lush as a tree is a palimpsest
         now aged, wind reentering a distance
     like i imagine your hand in my denim.
     spaces in between bury a pattern of insistence.

  carefully extolled when i pass by the lit TV
      wasting its voice to no audience,
  when we crawled from one room to another
       leaving words inside dungeons of mouths
    and when a tongue broke loose, maneuvering
      across a tablature is music of creaking wood
      and time-worn hinge - the accidental thump
     on the bedpost softly sings

              a punishment: now an urge to go back
     yet not knowing which door to enter,
           every surrounding object as witness,
      memorized a minute's completion,
  refusing to map out which way to go.

This old dog out of dogdom,
   in all of bones scattered elsewhere remaining
   to be unseen, hidden in old glory and flushed lives

In all their shapes and sizes they have
   their bow-legs and their collarbones dangerously
   recoiling in and out as if to ****** fully bare
   for me to see -- invisible hands for invisible reapings they go ******* clad else there was wind
    in all rooms winnowing to make good use of
    my time and unhinge the doors to toss them out
    of their senses and into mine
    letting them wear me thin like paint to turpentine,
    in this house that refuses to let go
    of fragrances underneath this cold rondure

I have forgotten how it was to love
    and clad myself fat with flattened foolishness
     not having loved enough to remember their
      weights crushing my bones so dearly feigned
      my eyes and skins love-crumbled and
      positioned to surpass their flow amidst breaths
      held like ******* or my collected body going
      into another's and completely vanishing
      in a thick scent of fluids so virulent and mundane,
       putting a smile on my face and an anchor
      to my wrongness as if to drag along ineluctable
      and loveless down the stream of many names
       i will confess to my first-born son

   so we can fill parks and stare at them once more,
     laughing at how they have broken us.

and so the continually pained
  redressed, sawn-off are fingers

  to halt the clutch of things
  not ours -- pure in the hour of

  restlessness, all oblivious/
  and no such mechanism as dream when

  our tides harbor at shore,
  paled and on bent knees wryly

  seeking plenitude hours compressed
  in uncollected days, in here was uttered

  its rapture of light displaying its luminosity
  of absence, this is what they said it would

  be but did not come to be, seen only
  at a distance coming to intimate terms with

  pilgrims of shadowed cities bearing no
  names. our nakedness to its promise

  do so sing, nothing else but move to
  its beat, alive are we but not too long,

  this interlocutor, for now
  we dig our hands in mud and face the sun.

1

   flumine stretches to the small of her back
as the    clock  slowly    runs off from
         twilight    to   midnight

     perfect time   for    assault   but  undeclared

say   when   tugging of   hair  to expose
     the jugular --  that is   where you plunge
           the  message

          when  biting   the   lip   becomes
        predatory,  when sweat    is   the telling
           trace  putting  the  clandestine, ******

        or  easily   when   hold   becomes   grip
     else it was just   estrangement    face to face
           in the   dark,  cannot  remember   features
              only   textures --  walled up message tongued    in   all   fours as if  a crucifix or idle
           penitence

2

        whoever  was   steering   was   just
    teaching  how    to   hate,   treats as   open and
        easy target,   mapping  out   what   to sequester
           and   authoring   silence    as    acquiescence.

     first trust  is   given  and   is thrusting deeper
   in   hollow   grievance. we have   no   use  for  it
        and so    we    take   it as   the first  step
            out   of   the door  keeping  love unharmed
     only  to be   taken   in  unmindful of   its implosion.

3

       we  then  have   damage   portrayals  as   if
   we   have   a   long divide,  or  a grueling  history,
       hit from our   blinded  sides.  

     a  man   from  another  country   could have  taken    you   from   this  juncture,
        but  he    is   somewhere lugging objects
 he   has   no use   for in   a haul  that was meant to
             drift  him away   from  sheer possibility

   and so   we   remain   here, a promise that things  will  start to exact  relevance, until  then
          we    remain, waiting for    our   smoke to
  dissipate when the last   fizz   of   fire   is sounded.

4

    you   do   to   me   what   i do   to   you
        as  if  polarities   are  clear   reversals
   and   then   back  again   with hope

       so i  drink   from   your   mouth   what i have
given   as   your   body   depletes,   your   fingers
      crenelate as   you     rebuild   your   stronghold,

          my   emptiness a  catchbasin  of  all the
   rain   growing   inside  you,  your  body  swollen,
       ready to burst  and   after   that
           perhaps,      forgive.

1

I  love     the    love    that   loves   to
     insult     the    love   -- so   abject,   giving
berth    to   himself,

  once   i gave    you   modest   figurines
      of    angels    but what    use   are angels
   when wings    are   clipped,  prayers are hindsight
 dashed     with     words     inflamed

    and    once     this   i thought   when drowned
         dies   at    last    but    makes   it as  fish-dream
  sees    the   punctured blue   as the moon  is
      discombobulated    in    the   water  which reminds


        me   of   a  room  so  small, your    face   virginal,
    one   with   white  curtains    flapping   endlessly

2

My      recent    memory    of    drowning:

    A   man    desolate
            trying    some   cockeyed  miracle
  on     beer,  using    a   variety    of    silence
     as    the   world like   a flat   black   disc
           continues   to   show   a  collection
      of      failures

3

  I   am   worried  I might   forget   your  face
  the   next   morning    but   there    is something
      to keep    the    light     from   passing
           beyond   and   not   through but still is
     evident     of   a  day   leaping   off    memory.

4

    My    faintest    memory     of
           drowning:

a     woman     glinting
       under    quotidian     Sun

            quickly      fades,     departs
   from    imagining    this:

      You   know    it    is    bound    to   happen
   and    both    of    you   are     now     drunk
         and   her    face     now    is   the    cold
     brink       of    all   places    so   placeless in   recall


                          and then the world all over, blue,
          deepening, rearing  multitude    currents.

Where else to begin

but from a repetitive scene where
light smothering the fractured windshield
is the face of a mother

and the brute agony
of a totalled vehicle, the countenance
of a father?

But which ruin takes its station
amongst all moveless damages?
What narrative to assuage than appall
    which has not been drawn before,
 say a line to daze the day into genre?

In transit we have no words for it,
  nearly giving meaning to a god and
  fray itself drunk with a lesson.
What space here remains vacant and is
  an invitation to a marred face,
 pressing against the upholstery but makes
 final its formlessness?

 What space is here that sits
     with in an acoustic? This silence again and again,
  a sign of a spectral dawn again and
      again released from what they spit at me

   those who are but vigils in pried open yesterdays
         decomposing from where I lay with them.

"In a room where the truth naked, shining"

                                The body wishing to break
   but cannot    still in fragile pace
            stringing  defeat   so sure in the air

     and rising from salvaged metal
   compressing everything to scrap;

         Every single one mum as water in basin --

   I am    akin  to  all  their   silences.
         What language could run its smoothness
     if not the same voice relishing in the beginning,
        drawing this reticence much more immense,
    commensurate if not death in the afternoon?

           From this room there is the disquiet
    taking form, the symmetry of a knife,
           crushed deep within my plight
            of wanton need. The night's meaning reduced
   to a stockpile of laundry soiled from yesterday's
           scuffle, the same metronomic sound of
  
       the world dropping from a high place,
   my hands dreading the catch from the fall.