I carry the runes of you in my pocket
Smoothed while recalling
Your blank walks

A wash of blackcurrant and
Holly in your hair

Wandering aimless by shorn clapboard
and storm kestrels overhead.

I think of your eyes
While watching Venus blink,
Tiny speck of green popping

Out of the witching hour’s emptiness

Distracted by a sweet orb only daring to show itself
in time-lapse Morse code-

City firefly’s shy hesitant glow
of phosphorescent luciferase
Impermanent tattoos in the humid air

Asphyxiated by the hum
of flowing electrons by wayward wings
Vintage and neon.

I sweep your edda into the hearth
Ashen mingling of myrrh
and incense sprinkles its cinnamon

Onto bare exposed brick.

The lightning-scarred tree
with its bullseye of char
Burned inside-out,
Cindered base,
Reminds me of our concatenated dreams.

I touch the ghost of you
Roaming the paths of King’s Chapel
and Granary Burial Ground

Farsick and windtalking to yourself.

I still taste the ozone on your lips
After you rained all night.

I throw the bait of you into the water
and the sunfish of Northwood Lake nibble the worms
of your toes.

And I watch the sawing motion of your thoughts
on DVR over and over
Hearing the fibers tear

Knowing the damage of blades and friction

How your heart will always bear
All ninety stone
of Hunters Lodge.

[response musics (i)]

what nostalgia is to angel, eyesore is to animal

most mothers
hate
being filmed

there is the way I hold my son
& there is
the way I hold my son
while running
in place

tornado means
I am touched
in a house
with no
basement

wherever it is your father goes
the postcards
there
are small

oh to see jesus
walk at all

~

[response musics (ii)]

I thought girlhood the boyhood of grief

childcare, handprints, the failed hearts
of octopi

toy / on a stair / left there / by doll

god (memory)
making its way
through the useless
infant

myself
an impressionist

(because all

my mothers
faint

~

[a prayer for the tall mother whose cigarettes void brevity]

piano that disappeared
milk
that didn’t…

feather in the stomach
of my angel’s ghost

~

[cleaning the body small and boy]

the brain a ****
in the remoteness of god

~

[removal musics (ix)]

what a quick study
addiction is

this longing
my father’s

(her childhood a pinning of morose insects)

no horse but maybe
one
that pillows
a tree’s
broken
hip-

this poem, lonely expert
in a town of goats

~

[guest musics]

sand in her ear
she goes
as a seashell
her small
joke
a way
of living
on land
with the ghost
of her unbathed
child
her mother
calling clothesline
the scarecrow’s
scarecrow

~

[how to make a body]

sleep
until you feel
it passing
the slow
mattress
drowsy
and afloat
designed
for god

throw anything
you can find

stick, stone, nest, honeycomb

bird
the weight
of wasp

- name
what lands
with a friend
you can touch

~

[being alone went by so fast]

we have in my city a museum just like this. I, too, am private and have lost an unabsorbed child. I am,

inventory, very motherly.

this one-man radio show about a father looking for his mouth. this tornado.

my first owl was a bee-loving tick. my first milk
was jigsaw

milk. being alone went by so fast.

~

[musics, other]

mother’s
farsick
palm, father’s

pack
of disappearing
nails-

our goldfish
insomnia

~

[toying with object permanence in kidnapper’s invisible world]

how
to unfossil
the mourned
boy
kissed
we believe
on the wrist
by
(we don’t)
the last
to experience
déjà vu

~

[lawn musics]

books on arson, grammar, vandalism…

god, multiple owners.

a typewriter
touched by father
at night.

the electric chair my brother imagined
& the hair
my sister...

adam (who’s never known the age of eve