Whelm: a book of poems

Whelm is part wildness and part witness, part love song and part lament. It is an elegy to former times and selves that admits fear of a future where humanity, community and strangeness are lost to manmade systems, and is also an ode to oddity and intricacy. These poems attempt to understand how difficult it is to be a thinking, feeling, speaking being in a largely impenetrable world-both wordless and written over with various conflicting narratives. In this manuscript, people are engulfed by forces larger than they, such as natural disasters and love, and are equally overwhelmed by their own feelings, desires and ideas. A central concern of the manuscript is figuring out how to live an authentic life or have real intimacy in a world that rapaciously wants to name, categorize, and commodify us. I conceive of language as an intervention, as textured and complex in a way that frees us from abbreviation and generalization. This manuscript suggests-as Bataille and others have before me-that there is violence in the ideal, that cruelty often arises out of categorybecome- hierarchy, and that perhaps the only conceivable solution to our flooding is flooding . . . to resist being capsized by giving into the roiling mess of our hearts and minds by admitting the endless cataclysms of our love, our inimitable eccentricities, and the ineffaceable plurality of being. This manuscript is informed by these wayward enactments of grief and loss, and by what Czeslaw Milosz called "A Poetics of Hope," wherein poets remain hopeful despite an intense awareness of the dangers menacing what we love. The world is not comfortable, containable, settled, or transparent, nor is what our own perspectives and collective narratives do with that world. I return to the truths of particularity and plurality, to detritus, explosion, fracture, to trying to cut through doxa and cliché to attempt to articulate the complexity of existing in the world, let alone a world increasingly ravaged by the forces of the market, industrialization, and large-scale mechanized warfare, wherein we are often very remote witnesses.

WHELM: A BOOK OF POEMS by Dawn April Lonsinger A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English The University of Utah August 2012 Copyright © Dawn April Lonsinger 2012 All Rights Reserved Th e Un i v e r s i t y o f Ut a h Gr a d u a t e S c h o o l STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Dawn April Lonsinger has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Katherine Coles , Co-chair May 8, 2012 Date Approved Paisley Rekdal , Co-chair May 8, 2012 Date Approved Kathryn Stockton , Member May 8, 2012 Date Approved Anne Jamison , Member May 8, 2012 Date Approved Lela Graybill , Member May 8, 2012 Date Approved and by Vince Pecora , Chair of the Department of English and by Charles A. Wight, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT Whelm is part wildness and part witness, part love song and part lament. It is an elegy to former times and selves that admits fear of a future where humanity, community and strangeness are lost to manmade systems, and is also an ode to oddity and intricacy. These poems attempt to understand how difficult it is to be a thinking, feeling, speaking being in a largely impenetrable world-both wordless and written over with various conflicting narratives. In this manuscript, people are engulfed by forces larger than they, such as natural disasters and love, and are equally overwhelmed by their own feelings, desires and ideas. A central concern of the manuscript is figuring out how to live an authentic life or have real intimacy in a world that rapaciously wants to name, categorize, and commodify us. I conceive of language as an intervention, as textured and complex in a way that frees us from abbreviation and generalization. This manuscript suggests-as Bataille and others have before me-that there is violence in the ideal, that cruelty often arises out of category-become- hierarchy, and that perhaps the only conceivable solution to our flooding is flooding . . . to resist being capsized by giving into the roiling mess of our hearts and minds by admitting the endless cataclysms of our love, our inimitable eccentricities, and the ineffaceable plurality of being. This manuscript is informed by these wayward enactments of grief and loss, and by what Czeslaw Milosz called "A Poetics of Hope," wherein poets remain hopeful despite an intense awareness of the dangers menacing what we love. The world is not comfortable, containable, settled, or transparent, nor is what our own perspectives and collective narratives do with that world. I return to the truths of iv particularity and plurality, to detritus, explosion, fracture, to trying to cut through doxa and cliché to attempt to articulate the complexity of existing in the world, let alone a world increasingly ravaged by the forces of the market, industrialization, and large-scale mechanized warfare, wherein we are often very remote witnesses. You cannot fold a flood And put it in a drawer,- Emily Dickinson TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................................... viii HURRICANE BIRDS ........................................................................................................................ 1 HOLDING.......................................................................................................................................... 2 WHY DELUGE.................................................................................................................................. 3 BACKYARD ....................................................................................................................................... 6 THE ECONOMIST'S DAUGHTER.............................................................................................. 7 THE FLOOD IS A FIGURE OF SPEECHLESSNESS ............................................................. 9 DIORAMA: MURANO ...................................................................................................................10 CENTRALIA, PA.............................................................................................................................11 THERE WILL COME SOFT RUIN.............................................................................................13 LA FILLE FRAGILE .......................................................................................................................14 SOFT PALIMPSEST ........................................................................................................................15 THE BLUE-GRAY BODY OF THE ZAMBEZI......................................................................17 TRYST ................................................................................................................................................18 FORAGE ...........................................................................................................................................19 AQUARIA..........................................................................................................................................21 [RUIN IS A THING THAT HAPPENS IN THE PAST].........................................................22 THE TRILLING WIRE IN THE BONE....................................................................................23 FALL OF FALLING ........................................................................................................................25 THE CASE OF LYDIA ...................................................................................................................26 AGAINST PLUGGING AWAY....................................................................................................28 INCIDENTAL LOVE POEM .......................................................................................................29 THE NESTED OBJECT.................................................................................................................30 EMERGENCY BRAKE..................................................................................................................32 ORPHEUS XXX ...............................................................................................................................33 CONTOUR FIGURE ON A CONTOUR FIGURE ON A ROCK ......................................34 SUNDRESS .......................................................................................................................................35 PET......................................................................................................................................................36 IS THERE ANYTHING LEFT IN THE LEAVES TO SPEAK OF....................................37 THE LEAVING...............................................................................................................................39 AFTERNOON ETHER ..................................................................................................................40 BINDWEED // REMEMBERING .............................................................................................41 INTERSTICE....................................................................................................................................43 SLOW SAUNTER OF WITHER...................................................................................................44 ARCHAEA.........................................................................................................................................45 HULL..................................................................................................................................................46 HAWAII OF MOURNING............................................................................................................47 INSCHEMIC CASCADE................................................................................................................48 vii KNEE-DEEP....................................................................................................................................49 HONEY ME, HONEY HUNTING.............................................................................................50 MATTER-OF-FACT ........................................................................................................................52 VANISHING TENSE......................................................................................................................53 THE LAWN AGLOW .....................................................................................................................54 TOUCH ME ALSO, GODDESS OF INEVITABILITY .........................................................55 FATAL LIGHT AWARENESS PROGRAM..............................................................................57 INCOMMENSURABLE .................................................................................................................58 MY TONGUE FEELS LIKE A WILD ANIMAL.....................................................................59 THE ENGINE .................................................................................................................................61 ARDENTIA VERBA........................................................................................................................62 THE FURTHER WE WADE OUT..............................................................................................63 THE BODY IS A NEST OF PINS................................................................................................64 SUNSPOTS........................................................................................................................................65 CONSANGUINEAN......................................................................................................................66 FOUR..................................................................................................................................................67 STORAGE.........................................................................................................................................68 CUL DE SAC SONNET..................................................................................................................69 LOVE LITIGATES LIKE THIS: ..................................................................................................70 [SALVAGED IN ASUNDER]........................................................................................................72 GOD SHARD...................................................................................................................................73 THE ICE FIELDS ............................................................................................................................74 ITHACA FALLS...............................................................................................................................75 [BUT THE RAIN IS FULL OF GHOSTS TONIGHT] ...........................................................76 NOTES ............................................................................................................................................. 77 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to the writing and artistic communities at Bucknell University, Studio Arts Center International, Cornell University, and the University of Utah, and to The Fulbright Program, The Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fund, The Burton Foundation, The Utah Arts Council, and Western Humanities Review for their support. At Bucknell, special thanks to the Stadler Poetry Center, the Bucknell Brigade to Nicaragua, the Bucknell Caucus for Economic Justice, Saundra Morris, Cynthia Hogue, Karl Patten, Stuart Horodner, Charles Sackrey, Michael Kaufmann, Jesse Heatley, Harold Schweizer, Robert Love Taylor, Pauline Fletcher, Michael Payne, Meenakshi Ponnuswami, Nicole Cooley, Lynn Cazabon, Tess Gallagher, Linda Gregg, Stacey Waite, Mike Diamond, Robyn Dillon, Jim Bush, Gene, and Annie Wiles for their passion and early encouragement. Thanks to everyone at the Jubilee House Community in Nicaragua, at 7th Street Café, and who were a part of the student art collective, Exposed. Great gratitude to my Cornell University MFA community, especially Alice Fulton, Ken McClane, Larissa Szporluk, Phyllis Janowitz, Cori Winrock, Charity Ketz, Lisa Maria Martin, Lauren Alleyne, Jose Beduya, Pilar Gomez-Ibanez, Marisol Baca, Tien Tran, Pelin Ariner, and Michael Koch. This dissertation grew bigger lungs thanks to the artistic and scholarly input of Kate Coles, Paisley Rekdal, and Jackie Osherow. Thank you also to other committee members and faculty members who have been devoted and inspiring mentors: Kathryn Stockton, Anne Jamison, Lela Graybill, Barry Weller, and Melanie Rae Thon. Eternal indebtedness to ix Rikki Rogers, Danielle Cadena Deulen, Timothy O'Keefe, Rebecca Lindenberg, Robert Glick, Nate Liederbach, Chris Tanseer, Ishion Hutchinson, Michelle Kyoko Crowson, Matthew Kirkpatrick, Kathryn Cowles, Geoffrey Babbitt, Derek Henderson, Barbara Duffey and all others who so kindly and brightly shared workshops and world-shops with me, and whose own work moves and alters me in astounding ways. Merci to those who gave me feedback on some of these poems: Eleni Sikileanos, Peter Gizzi, Susan Howe, Junot Díaz, Ron Slate, Stefanie Strickland, and Arthur Sze. Thanks also to those writers who chose my work for awards or special recognition: Elena Karina Byrne, Timothy Donnelly, Claudia Emerson, H.L. Hix, Wayne Koestenbaum, Dana Levin, Thomas Lux, Heather McHugh, Tomaž Šalamun, Susan Steinberg, and Lidia Yuknavitch. Incalculable gratitude to my dearest friends who have shored me up during the solitude and uncertainties of writing, who believe in the way my words whelm, and who are all such tremendous light: Ariane Allen Green (lover of forks and music), David Green (doctor and dad extraordinaire), Sebastien River Green (hoarder of books), Liv Rain Green (mover and shaker), Kathleen Jones (supporter of the arts & horses) and her always warmly welcoming CT family (such flowers!), Melissa Renzi (butterfly catcher), Hector Hoyos ("I'm on a cliff *&^!"), Ximena Briceno (giver of salts and seas), David Poznik (coalescent, indeed), Ryan Frace (historian of rebellion) and Carol Barbera (soul of souls). Also Shannon Ruddy for helping me understand early what friendship entails, Zelia Lopes for the dancing, and Stefano Pasquetti for being the first to love my wonder. Thanksgiving to my family: Barbara and Lance, Heather, Lance Jr., Rob, Sean, and Jess for the splashing around pools and for always believing in my eccentricity and wanderlust. x Great gratitude to Patrick Foran, who sews with threads of light, without whom this would not have been written, and my experiences and heart greatly diminished. Finally, for those with kindling eyes and sea-deep hearts, who believe in love, community, and beauty above all else, who shelter and lift up the subjugated. D[! Sincere thanks, also, to the editors of the following publications where these poems, sometimes in different forms, first appeared: American Letters & Commentary: "Archaea" The American Poetry Journal: "Diorama: Murano" The American Poetry Review: "Soft Palimpsest"; "[but the rain is full of ghosts tonight]" Another Chicago Magazine: "Holding" Anti-: "Knee-deep" Barn Owl Review: "Sunspots" Bateau: "The Flood Is a Figure of Speechlessness" Bellingham Review: "The Trilling Wire in The Bone" Beloit Poetry Journal: "The Blue-Gray Body of the Zambezi" (and reprinted on Verse Daily); "A Contour Figure On a Contour Figure On a Rock"; and "Love Litigates Like This" Blackbird: "Slow Saunter of Wither" Bombay Gin: "Bindweed // Remembering" The Cincinnati Review: "Emergency Brake" (nominated for a Pushcart Prize) Colorado Review: "[salvaged in asunder]" Columbia Poetry Review: "Incommensurable" Connotation Press: "The Further We Wade Out" Crab Orchard Review: "Matter-of-Fact" Crazyhorse Literary Journal: "The Body Is a Nest of Pins"; "Ithaca Falls" DIAGRAM: "Pet" diode: "Ardentia Verba" (and reprinted on Verse Daily) Drunken Boat: "Hawaii of Mourning" Fourteen Hills: "There Will Come Soft Ruin" The Journal: "Is There Anything Left In the Leaves To Speak Of" LIT: "Consanguinean" The Massachusetts Review: "Centralia, PA" New Orleans Review: "Backyard"; "Incidental Love Poem" Notre Dame Review: "God Shard"; "Why Deluge" Packington Review: "La Fille Fragile" Phoebe: "Storage" The Pinch: "The Lawn Aglow" Poetry East: "Sundress" Post Road: "Against Plugging Away"; "The Ice Fields" Redactions: "Afternoon Ether" (and reprinted on Verse Daily) x i Smartish Pace: "Fatal Light Awareness Program"; "Interstice" Sonora Review: "The Engine: Elegy for a Bus Driver"; "Cul de Sac Sonnet" Southeast Review: "Honey Me, Honey Hunting" Sycamore Review: "Orpheus XXX" Western Humanities Review: "The Nested Object"; "[ruin is a thing that happens in the past]"; "The Case of Lydia"; "Hull"; "My Tongue Feels Like a Wild Animal"; and "Ischemic Cascade" I.O.U.-New Writing On Money (Concord Free Press, ed. Ron Slate): "The Economist's Daughter" Best New Poets 2010 (ed. Claudia Emerson): reprinted "The Economist's Daughter" The Nested Object (Dancing Girl Pres, 2009) Poetry Society of America's Emily Dickinson Award Finalist: "The Body is a Nest of Pins" 1 HURRICANE BIRDS In the eye of the storm we came up out of basements and found sea birds in our yards- gulls and terns stockpiling debris, and frigate birds gliding flawless over the interstate. A white ibis crawled out of the gutter and loosed its looped limbs into the air. Petrels and doves swarmed wet parking lots. What glistened overwhelmed us, swallows rising like a sheet over the injured 2 HOLDING At night something blue brushes over the laundry. Our house holds our dishes and necks away from the come-hither chroma of stars. The lamp flounces a little skirt of light onto the dresser. You are naked, kneeling by the bath, your palm under the water as if to stop it. Our house holds many mirrors. Our house holds drawers of thumbtacks and ink. The moon is not a marrying but in it everything a chamber, remedial- Our house is saturated with carpet. I hear the hum of a sky that scissors elsewhere. Sea sound of unfastening. Our house holds portraits snug against its chest. I am pulling out bobby pins. It is an era of subtraction. From outside looking in, our house is a gash between curtains. But you are warm, lifted, cupped, the water hugging you in half. 3 WHY DELUGE Forget, forget, and let us live now / only this -Ri l k e I. because fruits have no mouths you follow me into the pelted fields where there is no way out of this- storm windows sparking, the delta splintered within us like veins we touch our flinty skins together, but nothing leaks inside aftermath, my pining deep enough to trawl, my knees caught in the damp twine of our historic sleeping bag my skirt soaks up the whole of the landscape, ankles damp and root-like in love forehead unmeasured-there is no use in asking why we are grown over, at this point adjourned somewhere the sloths so gloss & grown-over & holding on II. because lakes lean in to hear the earth's alibi III. because longing leads too often into vagueness- I stare too long into the lawn of starlings, watch them throng & trickle like an answer and feel myself fasten; how often have I tried to safety pin the past to the present, felt the rain drip through my hair an outer I.V., a trembling? IV. because time is all about the drag of water through space 4 for semblance. it makes a lace divisible, a lace pretty, a night full of flickering hooks nature's applause echoes over glass and I feel your forearm roll like a wave over my hip though you are far-flung and, as far as I know, still solid V. because the river nearby, pulsing. depressions fill & palindrome the children-a foot casting out a foot, a face perched above a face and we catch the chorus of discrete beads falling into our haphazard whereabouts and beveled shoulders, for joy cannonball into our reflections VI. because I was once wet, fishling & fetus & fog, and while we are watching the rain fall as signs into the buoyed ships of stamen, particles are gathering and ascending, swamps assembling again the earth-who's to say we will see any coming at all?- I hear you breathing but you are not here. The earth tries to embrace me, ankles first. O gleaming birth of buildings, palms, and hoods! I begin to see where the sun has stained open a spot to sit VII. because the moon is a tranquil eye upon a less tranquil world and my body is an island tugged in every direction out to sea, my resolve the thin strip of coast that tides lift up over and envelop. shells clink against my city wrists and your voice is in every shell 5 and your hands are all the wetness because our breath is too heavy to hang in the air and ablution seeps into us through wounds, water tangled in the foreclosure of rocks, the mind or it sways back and forth for 3,000 years in the sea, dusts our things with the promise of salt, pulls us through the thin wiry stems of moss- 6 BACKYARD The moon licks one thing, lacquers another, is powerfully soft-spoken, turn heads of lettuce porcelain, and sometimes within the moon's bone china dogs pierce the dome of darkness with a howl. Each of us delicate & irrelevant under layers of blankets, shellac, the cold steel of the grill perplexed. Metallic insects at work, earthworms digging tunnels, churning the soil. The laundry damp and glowing on the line, and your dog pinned to her spot of grass unaware of the two teenage hands that drop her eight pups, one by one, in the pool, just to see how they struggle, then don't, their yet-unopened eyes laced with chlorine, their small bodies drifting down, through, into the amniotic sac of the world, moonlight pulled over everything like a television screen, what is real, difficult in the sheen. 7 THE ECONOMIST'S DAUGHTER Wherever she goes, trees follow, flash their blank greenback hands in deaf applause, nervous excitement, as if to flag her down or surrender, as if to imply a state of emergency, carve up the wealth of light, but she walks through the forest that clumps around her like it's the biggest nothing to note. Despite this ticker-tape parading, she skips to the slow messy churning of her own heart. She shies away from addition but gathers lilacs in her skirt, arcs her back into a bridge to broaden her own custody. She seems confident that her interest will not falter. She tells her father that in her dream there was enough water for everyone to go swimming, but he only hears a faint fraction. He's too busy listening to registers humming, money heaping like bees to the hive. Her dreams may be instrumental since he's always on the lookout for an apt metaphor- "The economy is a small girl in the blight of morning; it's an ocean, the tossing about of slippery schools of glittery fish; it's butter-smeared, whipped, melting. The economy is bubble, crater, rocket, a green shoot." She has gone outside again, into the glut of spindly things, amid the dim cloying microbes poised over the dumb yard. He's trying to coin just the right phrase, to say succinctly what we are about to lose. He's pacing, thinking things can't get more fraught, but when he looks out the window he sees all the leaves suddenly drop down around her softly like play money. It is the most beautiful schism, a plunder he can not name. He can see in her eyes- all spark and slalom-that she is not easily enumerated. 8 She is a bright light in a landscape of numbers; when she smiles the zeroes flower into lust. 9 THE FLOOD IS A FIGURE OF SPEECHLESSNESS you have noticed all of our syllables are wet, mist of eyes. hydrant-worship. maybe they can hear the glaciers tipping, water rising. maybe the ovary-nouns by their own de-vice map the water in our bodies dispersing like shrapnel. the bomb contacts no one, but rattles blood through catacombed cells- flash flood. maybe wet is another word for without. adrift. our shoulder blades are perfect flotsam-rest your head here. when a flood flails down-if there are gods up there-they inevitably try to see themselves in the flickering dark muck of it, bright unforgiving mirror, but there is only glare. you have noticed that things wash up from an unobserved but massive sea. that your wrists move like moon snails. maybe when you cry you break with form, end up rippling through the gills of a sting-ray. 10 DIORAMA: MURANO What is the whole place but a curiosity-shop, and what are you here for yourself but to pick up odds and ends? -Henry James Here, where the streets are stalked by streets of water, where everything seems to sway in its impossible cup, the vendors of memory sit in their stores of glass, their eyes clear as marbles. Lampposts never turned off that we may glint our way through the tiny unexpected murmurs of trinkets that promise to intervene in death, to snag it slightly on the brittle sail, or hoard minutes in corked bottles, the air sequestered as long as there is a delicate ship in the center of everything, as long as our brains stay sanctum-still. Somewhere the hands of children glue together bits in a shoebox : diorama, aquarium, people hushed in their copy. Train of glass, vessel of glass, peacock of glass, bowl of vivid glass fish, glass sun of no center, glass ring, city of glass, violinist of glass caught on one subtle note-the breakability of everything wholly unambiguous. Light cuts through each thing on its own terms. The menagerie moves as slowly as your body turning. The vaporetto light touches through the fog the port. My arms are full of the carefully wrapped, and I say to myself-linger as if you yourself are underwater, something tossed. Every square and canal is lined with display cases, but behind them a tank of withstanding-the translucence more than we can bear, all that we want to own. The tiny glass horse emerges from the hot wand, and surgeons everywhere are making origami flowers in our barely bodies, frail but possible. 11 CENTRALIA, PA The ground is susceptible to suddenly sinking- a fire tunnels through to the dirt from where the earth's unassailable veins ventriloquize silence, blue mouths blackened with coal dust, unswayable as pigs from pig feed. But the fire does not hunger, know fullness, is like the blood in our bodies, just there, driving. No map, but amplitude. Attempts to smother the fire were unsuccessful. The fire is saturated with fire, will not stop until stopped, chunks of granite against its ghosted cheeks, calming to death. The flames see nothing, smell nothing, just fold out deep beneath our feet, forty-six years and burning. Near the detour in Ashland a cemetery is singed from the bottom up, as if bones were another of nature's vocabularies. Where there was a church pinned down with clasped hands, there is a fissure hissing. The highway through town is cracked open. Something is being born. A family stops, gets out of the car, leaves it running clink & hum. The mother bends down, flinches from the smell. The father and daughter and younger daughter and son all bend down, touch the road, find the earth warm as pancakes on their palms through two feet of asphalt. The trees' curtains are drawn, what's left-bleached, and this dissolves in a float of sulphur. The older daughter feels nauseated, doesn't know the feeling. They depart slowly-like those remote residents, fumes flooding their backyards-drive down 61 toward Dark Water, PA. They say that the ground collapsed under a man, that he clung to the roots of trees. Most people left with government grants in hand, their eyes 12 as vacant as old coal shafts, memory stripped to echoes, but a few remained in single row homes without rows, fire bleeding through their veins. 13 THERE WILL COME SOFT RUIN after Sara Teasdale that we were present in the gone-ing, dawn wiping away the green night vision, the pawn shops shattered with lust. that we hunkered down in our couches, hit play, skimmed the day's drown -ings. that the hydrangeas silently hemorrhaged truce while we mechanized, were thrilled about the cruise. that the fences hum and deepen, become zones, the canaries-cage-float-dimming the neon bones in our 10mm thick tanks & skins-shark, combatant. that the singing is singed, mothers picking off lint, nerves. that the grounds will come, rise up around us like a gown of inescapable mass, mudslide couture, fuss of forensics-rigor: we the swallow, tremulous fragment. 14 LA FILLE FRAGILE Her silver waist went out to sea like petal debris, rain-tattered ma chère parfois and my feet lessened into shore so not even the biggest mirror could reach me Now the sky sparks with remembering her eyes afloat in the darkness mon autre moi, my sad little nuptial glance Who will risk more extremely the south of my sorrows? Admittedly you sleep whereas your smile- Nous avons dormi dans les beaux bâtiments; light is remorse and what fades repairs her Clearly, you very little till now not to be phase of phase and the mascara is sad. She wilts the way I clutch purple elderberries in my shirt J'espère coïncider How to risk more extremely la nuit? A small bridal fall? How to make wither the quiet black city she left? You play the door. I will play cumulus. La musique fait. The song of lamp flowers festoons foreheads as they pass. Probably rightly you the ailing repair, you the light of regret Ne pas Ne pas ma chère parfois If the peaches fall and disappear where the peonies parcel out the moon and our fingers scatter like lightning bugs, des serviettes oranges pour l'occasion Elsewhere magic acquits us Obviously il y avait beaucoup d'oiseaux, obviously we sleep underneath amplifying departure 15 SOFT PALIMPSEST the forecast kisses my cheeks with upheaval, says here it comes and I feel a little tingly, sky darkening to slate, then brightening to white the thrill of undoing and hurdle pouring over our windows cans of soup and wax beans just roll off the shelf and then it starts-the slow wet trickle of love, the weight of what's above us divvied up, an unfamiliar parent dismantled the spilled milk of it who doesn't need an intervention? beautiful bright excuse to see the accumulation of evidence as answer to time-soft open structure filling soft open structure- the trees mock ups of trees, branches the cups that runneth over even the windshields are cocooned in material silence the gauntlet has been thrown: to dare romp, to toss oneself, to fall and let the cold recalculate you, to let the landscape adhere, drip into your carpet the street lights spread cellophane and we know our cars will need to be shoveled out (mini-drama of loss and recovery) but not yet first the brilliant long pause before utility it's a recap of the present-the shadowy shapes 16 of everything traced as if by the hand of a lover, music ensnared in the strange hubris of solids our own hands covered for protection seem instead-like little Christos-suddenly more present, closer, plump, alive my eyes begin to water because the gathering gods are hard at work, insuring each exposed thing is spooned 17 THE BLUE-GRAY BODY OF THE ZAMBEZI The river is full of albescent bodies floating, water tossed with light, lumbering undone in the earliest arcana of submersion. At night the bloat of hippopotami sinks into the earth, envoy of a galaxy draping its animal counterpart, the massive mouths slowly tearing up shortgrass, hunger chasmal. Now-sunlight a kind of king-fisher- these creatures, amassed, dial back the flow of the Zambezi with bulk. Each bull, cow, calf born underwater, drifts silently through the glass of under, river horses galloping through the ambient cords of water lilies strung gutless between surfaces. A cow and her newborn stray from the others. For hours they blink & plunge & drink & defecate, but now-the sun, a dim commute-the dominant bull rushes through the quietus, opens his mouth four feet wide, bites down on the calf. The mother tries, but he thrashes, releases the blue-gray body draining, loosened bricks of blood filling the Zambezi. The bull wallows. The sun does not bargain with the bleak: one new body floating lifeless down-stream, as human as ascendancy. 18 TRYST We are all addendum, the pangaea of our bodies knotted above linen facsimiles of our movement, adagio the others that stir with our thrusts- the bodies that have dented our bodies, distant seas we smell in each other's hair. We pull the air like winches between us & I know only that I would let you dismantle me. when you move in me I can hear the dead trying to tear themselves from inconsequence, like us and it is not the body but the bodying forth that titillates me. What if I could look at you and not wonder how the universe was constructed? swarms & disperses? If I could desire nothing? But occurrence? Our two spines form a bank in the dark that no one will cross over to get to the raging, famished river. We walk back and forth between the past and the future, carrying the present as two small pools of saliva in our mouths. Will the impending silence record everything? We linger into morning, and discover: we have not tinged anything, we have not yet disappeared. 19 FORAGE before barbed wire it was easy to walk away from cruelty and hunger to move like wind over the nearly uninhabited earth bursting with fruit the wheezing of deer mushrooms expanding inside of wet nights trout gliding knives downstream but cutting nothing to the next best thing forage and forget there is nothing primal about hoarding about the anonymity of faces in houses about the stress of holding on to clout to brandishing now every prostitute knows how to simulate a prostitute make itty Os in motel darkness nobody speaks of the wildness of farmers someone somewhere eating deep-fried songbird and Jenny talking to the stuffed parrot hanging in her cage winding the alarm clock she keeps in a basket because she does not own a watch and birds twitter in the skull of her hedge because the children and their little feet running over every blade are terrifying though at least one of those children feels suffocated by the sadism of normalcy knocks on her door to be near the beauty of foible to see her hands hold chocolate bars like hymn books to begin to imagine that the codifiers will not win the compliment of haunting by way of the violence of conclusion his mother gasps when the football players on the television fall down because she hates when they fall down because she has known great loss it does not make sense to replicate it even playfully she gasps as humans do when witnessing everyday obliteration or when hurtling their bones into one another during sex or conflict swoon or wince inescapable cry at the origin of the storied world prior to money but not desire and water and tongues carrying through with it inescapable heart and pubis of darkness wherever you touch the story it is not nice our journey began in leisure and pleasure famine is a function 20 of fields that belong to someone the rape of states untruth that conceals the rape of individuals with telephones and the saddest Jell-O molds a ghost like Yeats for every decade to teach us to again walk through 21 AQUARIA It's a lot like consolation, the way snow slices the window in half, and beyond it the ocean wobbling as if to hypnotize us. We are miniature within the warm glass atrium of the aquarium, which has been placed sensibly or ironically against what it tries to portray. We wend our way around brackish bowls that invite us to touch creatures that breathe water. I say-wouldn't it be awful to be one of the "Hands-on Area" starfish, to be a specimen relentlessly fondled? You say they probably can't tell the difference between our hands and an ocean tide. They're brains are probably teeny. I think, our brains our teeny. I think, maybe some people would be better off if they were regularly stroked. I think of the time we were going to sleep under the stars, but I was afraid a bear would eat me, of how disappointed you were in my clichéd fear. I don't comment on it, but you are wearing a transparent sweater. And your chest too is transparent, and your heart, and in that little beating carafe there is a man in a boat, and he's always looking up at us, but never speaks. He does not do anything as shameless as open his mouth, but he seems to be asking where his ocean is. I know he is thirsty because he is also transparent and his see-through organs are full of dust. You wind your way around the giant ocean tank trying to keep up with the green sea turtle's ancient eyes and crackled glass head, and the teeny man in his boat in your heart tips from side to side like a metronome. The turtle's mouth is much more avian than I expected, and its flipper-legs look like misshapen wings. The plaque tells us the turtle is over forty and eats lettuce and brussels sprouts. She's like you, baby, you say. When we get to the top of the tank and look down, she is blurry but we can still make out that her shell is heart-shaped and covered with horny plates. When I return from going to the bathroom, I find you in the Northern Pacific Room beside the giant octopus crushed into the upper corner of the tank. It looks like red velvet cake, but for the bright white suction cups that invite and threaten. You are in the middle of the room, turning in circles. I ask you what you are doing and you say you're moving. You are drawing a small circle around yourself, again and again, until the air seems to thicken. I ask you to stop, and you start crying, but the little man in your heart is not. He does not forget how you felt when you first looked up and I was there, all freckle and giddy girl. He is waiting for you to walk out into the light again, to drink water. The aquarium seems suddenly too dark, too scripted. You say-did you know octopuses are very intelligent? And strong? When we leave the aquarium, you say you have decided to become a sea voyager so a few days later a group of us go down to the dock to see you off. You are wearing a bright yellow shirt that I can't see through. The sun swarms our sea-salted hair, and you impress us by getting a seagull to land on your shoulder. Your cheeks are rosy and your eyes look like commentary on the limits of glass. Then you are off, drift into the blue distance. We all feel a little bereft. When I get back into my car and flex my foot, join other sitting people sliding over the gray interstate, I picture you being jostled in the sturdy U of a boat, how life-like it must feel. I picture you peering up at the endless uncommunicative stars, sensing sea life ribbonning beneath you, how nice it is that nobody puts a lid on it. 22 [RUIN IS A THING THAT HAPPENS IN THE PAST] rain spreads like a negligee over everything- My longing is a forest, and your voice is all the birds that live there, are hushed in the rain. Let me learn the candor of falling, the open-endedness of roofs, how to knot my fingers with earth and let go, how to put down the unending letter. When I look out into the porcelain night, see all the fissures widening- beauty shattering in deep magenta alleyways, I long for the moxy of the torrential. The old men in doorways speak in a language we cannot know of how to slice evenly down the belly of a fish. The children keep darting out into the lightning, tempting the gods to tackle them. The rain is making a case-that baptism, that flush. That the stars will never belly up. That luster is, of course, an antidote to our eyes, and we are no more purgatorial than the pools underneath it all, catching the seemingly endless runoff, dirty as all get out. When it stops we go outside, electrified with silvery dampness, and stare down into the puddles. We see only the sanity of suggestion, the torn sleeve of time, evidence that we are not yet ghosts-all echo and ripple and swig. 23 THE TRILLING WIRE IN THE BONE The bone broken for luck, scraped for meat, collected for construction, gnawed on. The temple of bones. Bones that finger the shape & texture of other things- vellum, pudding, papyrus-only to find they, too, have bones: strawberry bones, mirror bones, horse bones, slot machine bones snapping back. A deer-like shape turns its neck and you can hear the tiny crystals cracking like fish bones. The big bones hold their breath. The tiny bones ballast the void. Turned over, culled, buried, dug up, desiccating in the carbon-digging light. Ultraviolent rays. Bones dislocated. Bones hollowed. Bones stained. Bones archived, crushed to powder. The wind blooming bone red. The singing bone. The translucent bone bodies of the cicadas abandoned. The alien borderlands: cartilage, tusks, horn, beak, hooves, their unique hip structure, a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. Baby bones seafloor-spreading. The wonderful fish-like economy of the lower back. The soft seashell bones of the ear vibrating: malleus, incus, stapes. Bones sinking, sinking in. Bones audible, frank, corrupted, bones splintering in the platform, in the crackle of the microphone: the lecture bone. Bone orchard. Bone box. Bone cellar where beets gulp vinegar, where marrow pauses. Bones in the bread, in the backyard, of the swing set. My buttered, residential, bones, sugar bones, damn bones, hip bones, crevasse. Bones boiled in broth. 24 Bones reconfigured into tools, stegosauruses, jewelry. Whale bones gathering the desert, the prayer of the bone on the beach. Signature of bones. Joint pins and hip replacements gravely gripping while ligaments pull away from the scaffolding, blood caulking the body, opening the amphitheater socket. Bones licked with live tissue. Bones connected, disconnected, wet. The moving, incoherent, bone. Imposter bones. Electronic spine. Skull captions. We were subjugated. We were alone. And the bones began to bargain with the body, vibrating first the heart. 25 FALL OF FALLING Everyone notices the fiery storm of clapping before the fall, leaving in the branches like a light left on long after wildfire has sucked the sockets dry. The whole undivided sky like an eye upon the set, where names are so new they jostle inside of things, things ripe and mouth-watering. What if we could watch it happen-the leaves blush & curdle in the lawyered air, all sugar given over to the blue reckoning of time? What if we could see the earth twirling like an aged ice angel on a shattering rink? Everyone notices the girlish cheeks of autumn, the electricity of severing. But what about the sheeps' blood in the farmers' sinks? The flaunting choreography of clouds crushed into rain? Pumpkin fibers gunked between our fingers, seeds already salted and swallowed? Wherever we carry the corn it disappears. Whichever unmarked trail we take the night follows us, and when we emerge again onto an open road we are marked by the desire to get out. Someone smokes in the middle of it all and the thin strands of smolder drill open the sky. The hawks kill the rabbits but do not eat them. We are intoxicated and damp, but also lost. Count the cotillions. Pile up the dresses that fell from girls' shoulders dramatically, like fucking might transform them. The boys' arms drop to their sides like brackets. Let us admit the ache of harvesting- the apples multiply before throbbing against the cold earth. Let us watch them rot, backward blossom into abstraction. Time tastes the zipper as you pull it, kisses my neck with your mouth, trails your tongue to the 6 o'clock hour of my wet vulva. Time is a tease, a tramp, a bully. Time with its mouth full of dirt, with its hands up our skirts. There are not enough Eves-knees ground into the grit of the evermore sophisticated garden-to devour the evidence. 26 THE CASE OF LYDIA Lydia treasures looking out from within display cases, tenderly climbs inside, a fawn beside mannequins. She leans against glass, tries to comprehend legs like lost roots in the water project. Yellow descends its butterfaith, trammels the ellipse in the dark horse breath of planets. Curtains across the pedestal dream and Lydia swims in the solitude of observation- divinely plotless diorama, medium-ship. Eventually the glass takes her shape, begins to slip cellophane around her skin- Lydia vessel, Lydia capillary, Lydia Lydia, drained Lydia but for the real Lydia who lies down inside this thin transparent version of herself, is unhinged by the vim pastoral 27 of her former body, can only look up through her domed skylight skull, envy the outline that cages her- lowercase Lydia Lydia gathered and frozen in an aquarium of Lydia 28 AGAINST PLUGGING AWAY what about touching your own arm as if it is a felled thing, or a hermit humming -bird about to hatch give me the corrupting cadence of rain, pens leaking through what -ever they can get their tips on the gripping redundancy of hands smart little balloons bursting thunderstorm thump of crabapples labyrinth fish pulling oxygen into mazes inoperative stare of stars- vibrato of growing things, your ears even- what if you could be convicted of nothing but sinking deeper into verbatim, plot of land dented with (dare we dream it) sleep over there the three-year old picking cherry tomatoes, the bright fission in his fists surely superflux, surely a break from tiresome go-get-‘em undersongs a levy of wind kisses your still forehead, memories fermenting through screendoors hushed patterns madden the rented room where you breathe like a bee spiracled to the outer world, not a car-bird caught in traffic why not watch the horses lug the fields into penitentiary light, blink about, let the sun fall into your eyes like a back alley baptism as waterfalls stroke the air with wetness 29 INCIDENTAL LOVE POEM I step in the water sloughed off your body onto the bathroom floor. I sleep in your stains, wake in your border, eat your leftovers, sweep up your dead skin cells. Your sauces sit in my refrigerator like organs in their transparent, breakable containers. When you are here I hear you cough, stroke your skin as if to keep it taut. We swap colorless, odorless gases and saliva. Our eyes bob in our magnetic faces. When you are elsewhere, I curl like an old photograph trying to raise its dead. I swim in three lakes simultaneously. I part my hair down the middle of my head through the mirror where you untie your face, the sutures undetectable. I think of your body as a plank and a screen, of your soul as a cloud of grasshoppers. My tongue absorbs the salt in your skin, swallows oceans, the giant gyratory seagulls scanning my face, the sun holding my tender pink core together as you do. I finger through your pages, listen to the symbols grind their teeth. Your things congregate in small heaps. They take on significance, crystallize, and I am deep into the damp cavern of idolatry. I put on your shirt, spread peanut butter on toast. In my dreams I fondle your blue glacier, pull hummingbirds from your chest, feel quenched. I admire how your mouth never looks like a dam blasted with carp, how it evaporates in the skeletal light of the hallway. Our gravity is horizontal, palpable as heavy whipping cream. I decorate absence. I pull one of your hairs from my mouth. 30 THE NESTED OBJECT this is where shape incubates the topiary brain-scissored by shadows: I have never touched the parrots at cage-distance mutely swooping in the air since the elegant filament flickered out in the forgetting curve. The shell of things is sometimes enough to track the tiniest center of the microscope nearing indifference: as surfaces give way, in, color disappears division is the darling of this time-the apple garnet then white then brown then the near absence of atoms these objects-inflatable pool, stuffed rabbit, cherry cordial, clarinet-can only be manipulated in dreams, the lobes lulled in lightmilk: staired beside the picture window. O, lettuce primped in plastic satellites, little house of lemon, red piano cupped in the palm of the ocean, everything we do not keep like heirlooms in the burgundy velvet of our organs- bell jar; spine lamp-krill staining the sea a similar red, even then a segmented translucence: our elegy cannot travel down the diatom breath-hall There was an old woman who swallowed a bird, She swallowed the bird to catch the spider, She swallowed the spider to catch the fly, I don't know why she swallowed the fly, Perhaps she'll sublimate, disperse with value, the ghost of wholeness absorbed by living cells like water sinking into any thing visualize the voiceless blood flow, bone pocket, 31 the nested object there are no figurines that heap the form of my lostyetenduring selves: enormous page, strange pasture of minute humming, lifeboats dangling above the terrific leaking, hallways of satchlings, cartilage clinging to the flung diagram, big dipper inside the bigger we are swarming animals, leave our exuvia as decoy, but our organs remain canisters in the sinew nest box: hush-hush pit, cup of coffee, night jars, battery, palmed heliotrope, land mines, dolls insulating the bedroom, gears veiled inside machinery, reusable space-craft, time tangled around fingers Ovipositors dip down into the meat of fruit, deposit eggs in the coddle-code of interiors Sometimes I am conscious of the sheath thickening the exit ramp leading only elsewhere, not out of the conjurer's cloth: dove then no dove: little spatterings of sameness I nest myself on this rocky ledge like a sea -bird married to the sustenance of surfaces, sun-bevy: held inside this ether, this ozone, dark ovum of space. If you look where I linger you will find the hearts I have harbored, swarming like sardines: the waves churning the bloodstream, an undercurrent dragging them back into the depths of the synaptic cleft where dreams and whale bones and all who I have loved: drift inaudibly by in urns like cars in a floating city where a skyscraper trembles inside a skyscraper 32 EMERGENCY BRAKE The car will roll down the hill. Everything you own is disentangling. Everything falls to the floor around the corner into the wall. Through the window, a distortion of plains. The car will roll down the hill. Everything you own will betray you, tend toward victim. It is best to unload yourself. It is best to unload as much as possible. The car is the first to go, a muffled negotiation. Finally your skull, heavy thing. 33 ORPHEUS XXX In this version you don't look back and does this mean that I escape into the light, that we might frolic there? or that I'm released into the whole-hearted solitude of being? You never look back, slip like wet clay, your arm already around another life, your Saab in her driveway, your head in the hollow of her unerring clavicle, your body like any other point along the dim horizon. The light presses in all around me like water. Breath by breath I turn to neon. We, you & I, are some brilliant unbetrothed interstice: sunlight & branches & a bird flitting here & then away. We are the most relevant unreality, the most distant truth, the glass door of some hell wildly revolving. I'm not sure exactly what I mean but I long & long & am lost in the phantom limbs of seeming. Outside of simple demise we are still susceptible. Beyond one brink we enter another, the memory of the last still swallowing our feet like tar. We attend, now, to our separate lives as if to vines of tomatoes, the fruit flushed to its brink of bursting. Our gardener wrists are delicate and ruthless. Light pours almost through me and I look like a corpse shuffling among the greenery, snipping. I see our reflections pooled in the still pond of the ceramic birdbath. Looking back is as likely as going forward, but you never look back. Outcome is inevitable. Either side of this fence could be myth. I am drowning in freedom, my augury of birds scattered as though by gunshot. We are both living in houses built by others, and the windows are blinded by their own formality, the furniture already figments, the fire escape gone, just gone. 34 CONTOUR FIGURE ON A CONTOUR FIGURE ON A ROCK the way the elbow leans on the knee - it could be coming from anywhere, this body or that - it is only when we trace backward to the conjunctions - wrist joint and ulna, if clavicle, if sacrum, coccyx or tailbone - that we realize we are looking at one body, presently wrapped in its own evocative pause - the closer I get the less definitive you become - you are a model leaking out of a model, an archetype dunking donuts in your mirror image. thin red and blue outlines jangle about the body like eighties bangle bracelets, vie for your contour - that final clause that collects you up and says - here - to the waitress, lover, interviewer, et cetera with eyes - so who shall win - the blood red rendition or the less permeable blue of you? - which too - cobalt, glum - is its own kind of blood, uninvestigated by anything - swings, stethoscopes, ATMs - outside the body - swirling secretive inside - yet thumbtacked to injury: anyone feeling blue today? your hair is equivocal, seems clamped on, the death clutch of a parasite - like dried icing or lava - we keep backing up - you sit on any rock - your eyes, wet chestnuts in a puddle of pixels - the blur of double-dutch dead-center - stare into the massive arbiter of all of this - space - the mouth cuffs itself like an activist to your image - such dedication to the thin borders that rope us off from everything else - each of us an expensive piece of art - the way your hand is cocked on the jaw, sitting like a dead crab on sand, makes us keep our distance - which means you become clearer by default - but one might find this very suspicious - superficies - the crab, the hand playing dead. 35 SUNDRESS The young girl felt like a swing attached to tiny straps that u-turned over her shoulders. She didn't have a waist, but she knew she had the makings of one, her hipbones small omens. Grape was her favorite Fla-vor-ice, and when she pressed the jagged plastic edge against her lip it dripped across her chin and into the violets on her dress, staining the fabric like a bruise. When she smiled her teeth were a calendar of plums, incomprehensible. Everyday, the young girl looked up into the pornography of clouds and wished to be a new girl. She didn't know why the neighborhood boys leered at her, but she had a hunch that it had to do with the future. She looked away from the overture of eyes, practiced being the girl she would like to be, dragged the translucent flowers and gauzy white cloth with her, through the grass, in pursuit of crickets, her clavicle a compass. Her hair was a tangle of insurrection; her hands unfolded in front of her like they were each their own animal. There was her and the dress that held her, her and the dress that hid her. There was the wide world and this pretty semi-transparent cotton, among other things, between her nerves and the gnarly nest of growth. The hem divided her at the knees, bobbed in and out as if sewing her to sunlight, the whole yard fastened with lemon thread. 36 PET The room begs to be further inhabited, to have a sun moving in its plaster gut. At moments a decorative urge, the parrot bright and entertaining. At others-a death cry, everything so still and lasting as sandpaper, burning through to your bones with that stillness, where even you are armature, near-couch. You would not be alone. Your love would transfer directly through your hands. Someone pets the linoleum, then you. You pet your lover's head, smooth "I love you" into your child's hair like amniotic fluid, like cellophane around a dome of chopped carrots. The Maine Coon sits on top of your refrigerator. You are fond of the unusual form following you as if it was your motor. As if an inexact circle was the shape of commitment. A shape you tend. Small box, cylinder, beak of noise, trace of liquid. How it curls in your lap, is impatient in your lap, slithers around your neck, licks your face, tracks up and down your arm, fidgets in your cupped palms, wants in. Even as its eyes swivel, cut through with an alarming precision. Even as we move, like them, constantly. We are hemmed in. The Dalmatian yanks on the leash, cuts off his own airway. Invisible in the pitch-black apartment, they still see, see nothing. A car drives by, headlights flooding their eyes, saucers filled before falling into silence. Only the fish remain at a distance, flash like memory through the tank. The basking light burns all night, as in a driveway of twenty years ago, illuminated nets echoing our hooks, mayflies amassed at the surface. A tan Chihuahua with three legs hops up the stairs. A python presses like SPAM against the glass. No one knows why the dove started to pull its feathers out, reveal its pocked skin. The frog doesn't hop. Stuttered gerbil. Shape is no promise. Our hands twist, more or less away. We live in a petting zoo. Touch everything you can get your mind on. Feel for the goat. Don't be stopped by his hyphenated eyes. Don't just touch. Trail that touch, pet-slowly, slowly. He, too, is fascinated with disparity and freedom, rolls a green ball black back and forth in the grass with his nose. Can you hear the whimpering through the packed dirt, through your bent wrists, petting? You pet the carpet where you once slept, and it curls at the edges. 37 IS THERE ANYTHING LEFT IN THE LEAVES TO SPEAK OF Trees hymn the architecture with slight movements. Over there students with the heft of books tugging them toward the earth. A quiet wind whips, and lone-together trees plug into other-than, weightless coins dropped, hit&run snip of autobiography. We are as dunked under splat, near-wrecked as nature, but don't rush to grab up these loose apostrophes, though in each leaf is the pattern we seek in sentences, the cliffhanger writ out- that we do live varicose, falling, golden.  We blow machinal, or pull tines through tainted lawns, out nature from nature, though soon the scene will be burnt shut with frost, burst open as blank documents, white with gorgeous interference, all our effort toward the pretty punched out.  Electricity flits amid the branches, and we are quiet startled onlookers, though horsepower is also in us, breaks out as muscular hallelujahs, gasps, applause. This is when the birds lift up in unison like a plume of smoke, and the colors of summer drain from the meadow behind the factory which knows no seasons. You read the landscape's lesson for the umpteenth time: letting go is natural and inescapable. Everything has a talent for leaving except you, who mourns how the light slides out of the window, how the birds take their songs with them. You know they will return, but the knowing never turns into trust. 38 Our greenhouses glow as if they'll survive our hunger.  Breathing's such a battle when air is a treacle of was, goulash of concrete and bookish things. Foliage falls through, and before we know it, we are beholden, combination-locked. Of course, nobody knows the numbers and it would take a lifetime to turn out the answer, or turn over the equation in which a duplicate of the answer is locked.  Dear Fall, At least carte blanche the buddy next to me, who has spent all day igniting your hectic math. For me, I only ask that my face, like the expression of trees, is blown apart a bit by the wind. 39 THE LEAVING pumpkins hushful and heavy in fields swell through vines that tunnel & fidget underground and leaves fall like table skirts, stillness scattered all at once from its frame the chain-link fence, the spokes of bicycles, the river's ceiling, glasphalt-all doused in autumn's rum: crimson, chartreuse, russet to be under the right tree at the right time, when a little wind comes crackling-as if that simple gesture might blur my life back once I helped my brothers pile leaves on top of me as I lay on my back, arms raking wildly at the air and ground, my eyes tightly closed until the commotion ceased and I was entirely under, the smell of decay and dirt pouring through my body. I opened my eyes and saw hundreds of beams of light loosened in the leaves around me, the world beyond my masked breath glistening, and I felt for the first time the joy of being buried, of disappearance now, I drive I-81 South, alone-Mack trucks, median strips, my mind loud as locusts, thoughts of war, of work, of therapy, which rest stop, which end, a loved one with brain cancer. The windows are cracked and the wind hisses, amplifies the smell of upholstery if, only for an instant, I could be consumed by the dropping trinkets of trees, embrace erasure, but the foliage flickers by, the trees bright & translucent as damselfly wings, the whole spectrum strung like fish from a wire 40 AFTERNOON ETHER Mold spores land on wet surfaces, and for three hours I remove this evidence, disinfect the bathroom with chemical pine, wipe away our wandering animal hair. On the shelf, I dust the clotted memory of mollusks, press the lightning whelk shell to my cheek and it threads through me like a pozidriv-head screw made of nothing: and saltwater swells in around my organs, fills up my body and spills out into the whole of Eau Claire, river spent on river, swallows dipping down, just above the new aquarium of the room, the house buckling, papers and furniture turned planetary, mute. I am split, underwater, wearing a bracelet of fish bones, wet sand filling up my ankles. Through the kitchen window I see an ATM floating by, the ether locked inside it, wet. Somehow, through the instantaneous, beyond the now folded garage door, I hear a car pull into the ocean, and my heart heaves itself back to shore, crowns, retracts, and crowns again, splitting the linoleum. Outside, the engine is cut, the minnows are gone, and the sun is the oligarchy that perforates. I feel my body in the shape of a shell, hot metal cooling under my hood, my fingerprints a whorl of branches, the bathtub blank. 41 BINDWEED // REMEMBERING Necklace bindweed which glitters and cools. Necklace bindweed which hoists my joints through my ribs, felons the simple custody of our remembering. How will I this hiatus? How will I this back which I cannot see without mirrors? How will you whisper when the wind has divorced itself from bluebirds? Remember my fishnets, my snapdragons, my light-bulb hands, cable of hair that copses the living room. Now tomato atoms cluster in the backyard, shiver in the remorseless nuptial of where else. Children of the shorn. Vaulted voices. Small unfolding cabinets. Which erupt. Which thicken. Which snag.  Now remembering bulbs our nuptial hands; wind glitters our joints-bindweed, bindweed which fishnets tomatoes in light, snags Bluebirds cluster in backyards, mirror atoms whispering hiatus. How remorseless unfolding. How divorced the snapdragons from voice. Will I remember the children, the felons, my own ribs hoisted into custody? Cable which I cannot see, which cools through a small thicket of hair? Which room of where else? Which room will you back into? Cabinets of necklaces. Shiver of necklaces. How, without, will I simplify this? The shorn. The vaulted. I which when itself wills from my-our, which in the copse has erupted- my my my that the living  Tomatoes without hands will the children to remember necklaces of snapdragons, necklaces of voice 42 that bluebirds weed and bind to light. Small vaulted ribs. Simple joints. How I cannot shiver. We wind their custody through the copse, whisper our unfolding. Rooms erupt into living hiatus. If we cluster the nuptial in the backyard, will a felony of atoms glitter past our remembering? Bindweed the bulbs that otherwise divorce? My fishnets cool back into me. Now into you. Will you hoist me, our cabinets of shorn hair? How else will we cable the room which cools? Which itself thickens with remorse? How I lessen. When and where and which snag. See- 43 INTERSTICE A night passes inside small car doors, their empty handles confronting our hands. The precincts of everything evaporate. The canvas of the body un-stretched & trudging backward through the visible corridors of the cornea, into a former, less rented foyer of yourself, where you can't even remember the body, let alone its religions, but what remains are these ethereal steps of spine, with which we climb into each other, into our disappearance, our shudder, our slight song. A seed exploding in blackless dark. We wake with a dusting of sugar around the mouths of our pores, a whisper about the body. 44 SLOW SAUNTER OF WITHER A cow's ears can turn in any direction, and the field is full of those flickering radar, small curtains of flesh. We are an acoustic location, a passing thing. Our car gulps in the grass air, is pulled by an under-current. Dependence like a taste, the dark drawbridge of night folding form down into nestle, wind rattling the hollow half-note of mailboxes. The chest floor opens upon the earth, slow saunter of wither and hook bone, verb between sun and graze, sun and subsequently. No moo. No matter. Who or what was the first to look toward the teat of another animal and feel thirsty? Did they also feel suspended? Sleepy? Cosseted? Guilt or indignity for the theft? I am, even now, startled by their calmness, heart girth purring like a small fan. Milk teetering in warm pockets, and us nearby- continuous intravenous drip. Dream of clotted cream, sinewy lullaby. Water to wine-that's showmanship. Water to milk-that's love and peril. A marriage that should raise a cathedral up around their pin bones, sacred the space so to take is to need: dire roast. But instead we forklift the living into the living, harvest what we can. News reports recall meat is piling up in school districts. Freezers. Hangs from our bodies. When the cows lie down in unison, we better run for cover. I try, but my feet are full of meat, heavy against the moving vehicle on the moving earth, milky clouds amassing above us like a scavenging. 45 ARCHAEA flushed quietly out, so quietly cut at the ankles, tethered to a tree in the dark specimen jar, carried off, eaten glistening cherry, correspondent, spoon tuna out of aluminum, moist flakes pull off in one piece like a chemise, the zebra's cutis the horse swarmed the kangaroo tail all that remains of the kangaroo after a billion years will suddenly collapse into no kangaroo but the specimen, the jar filling with dust and brine, we are the bright luminous hydrogen clouds and prominences, the extremophile, gulping toxic skirts nerveless anything debris blood platelets under the swarm of ants, the aluminum cloud closing both its mouths, a tube jellyfish slipping like a spoon into a can digestion a light show of the bottomless 46 HULL after Egon Schiele my hand a small piracy on your chest. your arms splint of light & effluvia. how mounting seems an answer. trains have cut through forests of voice but here our pubis glints like chrysalis. we disappear in back -ground. swarm. cluster. I hazard the knots of you, cling to your contour- thin skin so as to gather. all the pink parts of us glow, plumb inward, like the postponed anchors of water hyacinths. nothing overt as bone, cells lurking. in what truth could we float? your shoulder is a cut of meat I would marry; I place my ear against your back, hear an inner form I can almost comprehend. bravely our masturbation unlocks the combination of diary hips, gestures toward a juncture that invents solitude. our rib cages keep pressing into each other, as if to nurse, to disperse, to come undone. 47 HAWAII OF MOURNING Imply the body to something beyond the body, from ground to floating, from the chemical swap of spit to thoughts wraithlike in their delicate coats. But enter the televisual, the virtual, the skin skinned, the sun neon in this cave. If only the fleeting, the pop-up, the chatting would drop like concrete into our cabinets of tissue. If only the copies stopped reproducing, and we pick ourselves up from the plush carpeting, rewind our knees. Light hums in the belly of the machines, myelin scarred and unable to pass messages through our bus stops' toxic skirts, end stops, camouflage. 9/11 tendered, carceral, a skin with pores so deep they fit planes through and come crashing down, backbone through facades, surfaces on the verge, surfaces that distend like over-watered lawns. Gloss the seemingly spontaneous event. The children freeze at their darling desks. We try to pry their fingers open, but the Play-doh in their palms warms. Click on Suicide Girls to see salty skin spread boldly over its scaffolding, stick to its origin like spilled glue. Audiences grope 9/11 like this: dislocated unease, hawaii of mourning. A lap bar falls across the gut. Intestines wind like a rope into a basement. Close the door. Pull back the skin to prove I am full of the working wet equipment of space. Chemical embrace, nitty-gritty. Blow-up dolls dreaming of a blood theater. Each bomb an albatross necklace, each cluster a communication. Put this pinecone in your pocket. This is a challenge. The seams seem into you. 48 ISCHEMIC CASCADE don't plan anymore. how wholly the city floods with electricity. yet the body is most alive when un-plugged, voltage centered in meat. who may well enter. we enter. we go into the emergency room, babies blooming in the linoleum vault. the stain relocates: body-cloth-brain-brain -brain. limbs are rulers of memory, the conservatory of self closed with arctic blueing. of all heart attacks are silent as snow against grass, the intricacy at once erased. the flow stilled in the stem like wine. somewhere beyond the measurements the bridge sways. the attendees panic in their tending. the universe originates inside something small, but not me. the tools and bulbs purse. you must be attentive: my hand has touched everything. 49 KNEE-DEEP The body - god box - holds the stuffing, blunt-winded plot, until it doesn't tissue of tiny details soaking up gestures of wedding parties, neurons, steering wheel, sugar bowl, the solarium the nectar ebbs from the design an autopsy, the openings filled with liquids, already locked-out of the house, embarrassed The river bank has been dented- material ghost, the knees lock-kneed, knee-deep What is left is fact and its antihistamine Carry it to the river and drop it in. Watch it give in like a vocabulary greased, the fish unlocked by their own removable beauty Echo the ocean of you when you (carrying the description) are gone. So swam the surplus, blindingly bright, away 50 HONEY ME, HONEY HUNTING I. Head in the inner hive, total darkness seven thousand hexagonal facets affixed to its be/e-face, the mosaic blooming while ours singulars in a locket of bone, the neck the root of possibilitybut riven with sight: diehard mirror, committed buckets-and this, this barrels around at a knock; even invisibility is registered, and I look through the peephole with thrill and horror, though mostly with those buckets again, hungry for light, for your body against the night lulling a bell in the blackness, proving it's not whole, but you are not there, just my head in its leaning-tarp. II. Thorax if only we could walk, fly, & sting without our pitch-dark firebrains, but traces of loving gum in the pollen-basket of our optic nerve, our ordinary nerve, as if useful, honeyready, I walk repeatedly toward the door that neither nor, is not a gift or message. We met in the sun which I suspect inspires that mid-flight mating, uncalculates the cunning rooms. 51 I want to believe in this bigger picture you whisper into the receiver, this fate you formula over my lips, but drones die in the act of mating and women have been paid to hold horse penises in their mouths. III. Abdomen near the nerve ganglia: the honey stomach, near the aorta: wing muscles; bar here, where our eyes, nose & ears congregate around the brain, the heart measurable expanses away, desert of blood buried beneath the glistening amber of our s/k/in; hark the right atrium collects the poor- gazebo of stingless bees, debeaked birds, ceilingless floors, mouthless humans. "Honey me a song, an avocado, a walk," I say to the diaphanous fossils, the detached words like wings, literal wings, falling flakes from that nowhere place of concoction inthesky I stick my tongue in-the future tastes like the motion of oranges tossed on the bed around me to suggest I am edible, pulped, segmented inside- in the hide, hidden, the honey den -and before the form is truly, my heart more than a swarm of cells the hands hover, dip down, hunt for the dream of autotomy, that toxins & matter drift 52 MATTER-OF-FACT Umbrellas open inside the body-can you hear the sad music from hand-painted furniture, the clamor of teeny apparatuses: tweezers, eyelash curler, razor, or further: scalpel, staples, stitches-the whir of shopping carts pushed through space into the echoing basement of the brain. One woman encourages another to get in shape as if there is an answer to the body-rhombus? star? chandelier? What word of mouth, paraphrase of ligaments, leaves us half-whole, entirely hole? The only channel coming in is a soiree of fragmentary debutantes, spread sheer across our skin like sweet&sour glaze-but in the dark of flood lights those beauties button up their monologues, wish away their cut&pastiness, cry truckload after truckload into Iowa, an ever more distant self. What fête, what adieu is there in throwing one's body back into a black hole, light eaten by absence, leaving nothing but the sputum of light? This disappearing act has gone too far-into our DNA, which will eventually grow hips, parentheses that suggest the body irrelevant, and there is nothing left to do, but step out of the gauze, empty anesthesia into the streets, and watch the tarmac go numb-feel the skin tingle under the fat sun? the untidy rain? We don't melt- and this is how we learn to love our other -worldly warehouses, our flesh so near it is the only clarity. 53 VANISHING TENSE Fruits are tweaked to tang like other fruits-tangelo, grapple, jostaberry, plumcot-hybrid rapture at our fingertips- Vegetables plumped colossal while pixels multiply, scurry like silverfish, then glaze. Kiosks migrate inward. Fumes douse the air. One thesis brandishes cutlery, another cuts. Wires dip down the throat, hood the plosives as connective tissue grows on the sides of buildings. Here, organs seem residual, romantic even. Light is the lake we remember through, jogging our memory with each undulation, our teeth conical and interlocking, our backs momentarily dorsal, no bones, small inconspicuous openings, the dangers glittering & spinal as fluorescent bulbs, the county line drawn over the sutures of our skulls. A dolphin's grayish back blends with the dark of depth, its whitening belly with the bright surface of the sun-laced sea while we stand in the foyer, eyes wet, waiting to be let in where genetics & scanners & peroxide have not yet burned through our bodies, made them transparent as surgical gloves, the heart beating in its gelatinous vanishing tense, the chambered nautilus knowingly curled in on its prehistoric cache, light leaking into its eyes, our arms full of measured solids. In the tampering we are saved, sliced off, repeated, the images & information of our images & information dropped like dollops of cream into our common, cyclopic sense, our faces paper panels spreading like lily pads across surface. We sit at the table dumbfounded by the intimacy we feel with meat, how long we stay with the gristle on our plates. 54 THE LAWN AGLOW Finally the sun has come out again. The slatted roofs are silently warming, small mossy things tingling in the pith. Poppy after orange poppy after poppy the earth laces its lack of ambition into the air as if to bind it. The cat cannot be convinced out of the bed of tall allium. Who can blame it for bathing in its body's island of warmth? What amniotomy of light. Cohesion ruptured. Shade & glare absorbing walls and birds then slipping away. Oubliette where everything emerges. Porches of fragment & leeway. The warm hose snakes around the foundation, drips tepid metallic-tasting water into the soil that hugs the house in place like a strange uncle. Get up thermal thing. Follow the flickering where ants lick the pink pink lids of peonies. 55 TOUCH ME ALSO, GODDESS OF INEVITABILITY Or watch how long I sit in the bathtub waiting to ripen, transfigure, transform into anything else really, something slippery and barely geometric. Let me be an unbeautiful beast with a heavy heart and eyes as wide as the night. Let me have no taste for song or salt, no cause, no boat in my brain I keep rowing even though it just knocks against the dock. The filmy indifferent water looks like amnios, no? It seeps into my body until the skin is waterlogged, buckling. How long before this version gives way, dissolves completely? I have no talent for fortune, cannot read the baby spiders traversing the droplets on the fogged window behind the shampoo. I just can't stop seeing how small they are, imagining the nearly nonexistent spool of their breathing. But you, Ananke, you know when to paint whiskey onto the barn and let the horses lick, when to let scatter a scene with a whipping boy, a dazzler, an outlaw, when to let go of a girl who cannot caramelize a kiss, when to consent to murder or an eternity of birds, whether the bullet grazes or sinks. You know when to let the landscape burn away and when combustion belongs to a single soul about to board a bus in Indiana. I have tried to know these things, to go with my gut, to be an arrow that organizes what it passes through, but I always end up with sadness upon me like a lace of pesticide laid over a field of fruit. Still, I feel another me inside of me struggling for a way out from under the endless compulsory ruin. Or maybe the tiny spiders trapped in the catastrophe of my waiting are already me on their multiplied way elsewhere, to a world of diaphanous invention and quiet design. Ananke, you know when to whisper into the animals' ears: go ahead, eat them. They're yours. Is it wrong for me to want to be near that? To be touched by such force, such certainty? To not have to single out a life. There's not a hesitation in your body. You are all wind and next-door- neighbor-knocking. I see how you just get on with it, interrupt a chest with a sword, arrhythmia, love. You know how to bring a city to its knees, how to discombobulate bodies with rubble and smoke, how to wait well beyond when the sirens stop and breath sinks into the soil and there are no questions left upon the cold earth. I am lonely. My body is lonely. I sit outside and let the wind tangle my hair. I understand that this is nothing like a relationship. I understand that relationships take time and hack it into bits. I understand that while we're not looking time slithers back together, wins. I understand that caring about relationships is still imperative. I understand my alternatives are limited: money, success, things on their own, collecting snow globes, darkness, having fuller lips, youth, money, death, death's big triumph, other endings, a lawn, escape. 56 Touch me, dear goddess of inevitability, with your giant mouth. Let me inside of that mouth where it's warm with ferment and finishing. Tell me the next person to come upon this apartment will find the bathwater beautiful and the glorious cables of cobwebs strung across the air like a note will be read. Tell me there will be translators for this sort of thing. 57 FATAL LIGHT AWARENESS PROGRAM Even the birds cannot avoid such reflection, the perils of daylight brushed so bluntly over things- tiny bones big world the infrastructure as much box as highway, the guardrails crumpled the bodies up against, intimately dying asphalt, vein, distance arched always under us a side mirror lost in the brush At night the artificial lights draw the birds, by day the inweave of trees, cumulus, all that is bluish & giving way O that the glass might open up, give us room, that we could marry the mirage, stay whole as seeds swallowed O spectroscopist- if only our radius, our hipbone would not lead us there 58 INCOMMENSURABLE The empty silo is begging for light. The mint is gone, though the trellises and the shop of replicas remain. Instead there are orange berries bursting like lottery numbers, shelves that lead tchotchke, whatnot, into sediment.  Polygons grow old in the shadows, grow tentacles in the margin, begin to think of shape as something more complex than itself, something more like a giant squid washed up on shore, the pressure of matter replaced with the pressure of light. The loss of medium too much to bear.  Pet the polygon. Toss back the squid! Leave the ocean on because it is the only television for me, and you are the medium, the undercurrent, the single frequency I understand: blue wash, blinding. 59 MY TONGUE FEELS LIKE A WILD ANIMAL I sit upright and listen to a lecture about body-soul dualism, God and Darwin and Descartes mentioned so many times it seems a nursery rhyme; meanwhile a sea forms in the groove of my tongue, nearly overflows my small unlockable mouth and my tongue twitches as if coming alive, rolls its thick pink body against the felt ceiling of its cage, and then splits my face to feed- I am the watering hole, the geyser, the gulf I cannot return to. My eyes drop wet ropes down the shaft between us. It lifts its head and I can see a dark underbelly, swollen purple knots nearly bursting loose. Which end is its origin? Where cherry lifts up into the air like a sensor or where it slips like a blind snake down the hatch of my throat? I can barely get a glimpse of it but I sense the quilt stillness of starfish prowling about my mouth- tip, blade, dorsum, root, body. Though leashed it seems to lead, my body now nothing but secretion, merely the place where the lingual lives. It's an in-house baptism. How else to reckon all the fleshy fruit everywhere bursting from zilch, the dumb universe? What is scattered might be gathered in the catch and release of air, in the patient explosive syllable repeated-ah ah ah ah-ha. So I am its shepherd, though it is no sheep.  Writhe and pant through the aquamarine night. What can I say? It wants what it wants, ravenous bundle of cables-licorice, cream, bubble gum, the pinkest dampest parts of others, brine of the viscera. Let us in. It sees the world as supine test strip, slip and slide of meaning and shock. Knock knock on the nodes of Ranvier. Give me the hot moist insides of things 60 or give me death. Give me songs that seed ellipses, that run our tongues over gravel. It moves like the magnetic eye of a panther, licks along the creases of the world. It's true: I'm hungry for dumplings, juice, inner ears, remedy, umami, nipples, apples, psalm. I try to stay calm, roll down a window, but the world wafts in and my tongue goes after it- licking legs and knives and lollipops. I am breathless, my hair sweat-soaked and tangled. I could bite my tongue, but it's got nerve, thrashes, arches its spine, breaks free. It cannot be trusted. It says one thing and I mean another. Besides, it's tied to spatterings of sense, a nozzle disappearing into a car, and the car sputtering into a crowded town-Welcome to the Tower of Babble. When I'm not listening, it floats a valentine to other tongues, and the next thing I know I'm mouth to mouth, resuscitated. Operatic going-to-town. Smooth slathering. I want to say something to let you know I am here, but my tongue is trying to tie itself to yours so as to not drift off. Or is it trying to devour yours? It's a tongue-eat-tongue world. Even now some tongue turns a bit of cow tongue over in its mind. Even now someone is silenced, someone glossed. My tongue gazes into your tongue's face as if staring into its own for the first time. But kissing can only carry on for so long. Eventually it backs down, realizes it can't untether itself from me. But sometimes it curls up and sleeps like a baby in my maw-desert fox; giant squid; parrot; urchin. Something is on the tip, but it's not what you think. Mostly, kittens mew and lick each other's ears, and I fall into the gaping muteness of flowers. The quiet sun covers us, low lilt of a lullaby in the distance- 61 THE ENGINE Elegy for a Bus Driver The door opens. The door closes. The sun somewhat perforates our profiles. Whoosh that we were a collective. You keep your eye on the road, let the rearview mirror transcribe your body as backlog. I look at him. He looks at her. She looks at her. They look at me. But you, you are left out of this loosening and thickening, seatbelt keeping your chest intact, gauzing against shoulder and into bus. My skirt spills, leaves me legless; my hands like fruit in my lap. Always outside floods us. You take our coins, drive us across the river. We are distributed and/or alone. You are yet again pale with restraint, your heart and the engine twins vying for which will consume the other first. When you bend the body wherein my body lurches I sway like a reed in a storm, know that we are caskets-in-waiting. Now is the time for someone to say they want off. 62 ARDENTIA VERBA the ocean laps toward shore, but land puts nearly its whole body underwater as if to live there, where touch decides we know nothing each medusa an organ disguised as debris the autocracy of the photon disperses, the diluted light of the moon returns to the surface, gently tosses tulle over a language of living tissue, the distinction between animal and location all but illegible, organized sea water amasses at the edge of breath to feed-mass ascension-radiant inkling of asterisms-in hydrostatic spirals deep below where the ocean hears the heart of the earth churning, urchins spill their sperm & eggs while jellyfish light up the sensory bath-instruments in the submersible bleached blue-mate & prey in sheer incandescence, luminosity a lure, lines of stinging cells billowing 63 THE FURTHER WE WADE OUT You have come to the shore [and] there are no instructions. -Denise Levertov Look here where we limn the shore by the thousands, laze away the day under an intercom of sun, let the collapse of water lull us to sleep, and you easily see wealth and languor, that we are wildly pleasure-seeking, honey bees lapping at a vast trough of nectar, cans of coke glinting like altarpieces in the sand; But look closer and see this: that we are together the children of spheres, lying out under a tangle of clouds with the persistent hope that the dear distant scattering orange animal will touch us with its warm tongue like a mother cleaning her offspring after birth. Each time it disappears into the sheet music of movement, we stare like kids who have lost their bright yellow ball in the brush, wait for the world to push it back into our palms, golden layer cake our everyday. And it does, roll out each time like a new idea, a yolk. The motes around the sandcastles slowly swallow the castles down, leave only the glistening subdivisions of light. The sand affectionately covers us with convection, glitters across joints. We wade out into circularity, our knees going under, our mouths O-ed in eager anticipation for the next wave to fold us into the diameter of an undivided world. Our earthen eyes reflect the sun's imperative-pour out another ocean. We are momentarily breathless, rich green seaweed ringing around our bodies- dispatches from the deep bell of beneath-sea swell like heart swell. The further we wade out, the less distinct we become, seeds scattering, making the horizon less linear. Seagulls scavenge, leave the carcasses of shellfish strung like syllables on the beach. And we emerge, our lips salted, the hair on our bodies beaded like the luminous strands of a sonogram, speechless but aglow. 64 THE BODY IS A NEST OF PINS The body is a nest of pins to stitch itself to sky- roughhewn hem that lets birds in and is still prone to piers, lets drop anchor after ghost anchor :: skiffly one- The body is an animal, waist-caged like a canary :: diagram of light and getaway. The body is an untilled field shot through with weed and wild; time afloat in onyx aperture :: eyes, tremulous night :: sight- isles submerged in a darkened pond. The body is the ideology of God :: joint and marrow and sparrows in chimneys to remind us :: permeable is each thing, and we :: things in which other things are repeated :: the whole world caught in silver nets of tissue and re-erected :: forms without form, but felt formly- Echoes electrify our less hollow chests-sigh, kiss. The body is a gathered curve collapsing upon earth :: swoon or faint; Ravage as a way of speaking- everything eaten down to scintilla, anklebone, bolt. Encyclopedic wind roils into us, sings amorously of zero in our glassy throats :: message after message swallowed- But maybe the body is most lace :: S.O.S. from one universe to another :: or a confession- blunder, love. 65 SUNSPOTS red spills from my nose, from small linear openings, gash, shredded cuticles, vagina, spreads out over my eye-a quiet dangerous lace- claiming the vitreous pasture of assumption, marking the ever-edits of my bulk. Nests of pink and plum form near the surface. A net emanates from the body, almost divulges the tenor of loss. to suggest no architecture can jell without light; blood swims inside, but bleeds outward toward the sun's ongoing magnetic moment, seems to want out of here like a teenager on a spree toward contamination. sometimes I even taste it in my mouth am reminded that I am a puncture of fractions that accrete toward a whole, that gather around openings like bright lipstick. Elsewhere black holes assemble away. I watch the liquid rise its diatribe into shape, then exceed and trickle-immigrant hieroglyphics of swarm. The blood jostles inside its own cell. love at first wrapping, liquescent kaboom so that the girl who grips her own wrists like celery, cuts through the uncanny seamlessness, is asking to undergo further faster amendments, to evaporate, even incompletely, into the air we breathe, to make a sound by letting out the living from the living zombie particles aloft 66 CONSANGUINEAN countless things float in a séance of water, irrigate cohesion (though each, also, a lesion in the ether of sheen) the water not yet touched or named, I trust its solvency/heat index/meaning even if it remains opaque/dense/saline, not anything downright as a reflecting pool, a birdbath, but some sort of quantum entanglement between you and me flux folded in unfolds fragility scaffolding & light (lux that crams the eyes, the unembroidered properties)-deep sea life, the bells of jet propulsion stinging water (death by water) everything was haunted (pools, lakes)/diagrams of the errant organ the support system and mutiny of everyday objects (their electron clout) & the sometimes terror of the inanimate-diorama, miniatures, blind trinket, the souvenir floating off the shelf, all whatnot withstanding beyond our lives, perhaps, terrifyingly, forever glass, relationships lost in language cruelty (our level of attendance- kiosk or junkyard, quarry or church): god & crowds & butter from one point source slowly slowly the glaze the blueing print dead center, forms flailing sugar amassed at the surface-haptic (phew) interference I swallowed some dated sun rain through the hole in our Pantheon heads I tapped the Lladró, stomped my hearts, collected shells how long I cannot count please, with whatever epoxy works, the mesh our only body 67 FOUR it wasn't to be foreseen this chance assembly- our four hands some hindu god over the raw fish so that I think-what if I put my hand inside your hand, not the titillate-courtesy of holding, but hand-in-hand, my hand swallowed by yours, your hands filled with antecedent- matryoshka hands; what you touch I touch you reach across the table to touch the ghosts of my former hands and I feel anticipation burn in our bloody double tissue like the second coming of some other christ- tinderbox your desire twice over. and while we're fucking I imagine the whole structure collapsing down around us, everyone undone in the stream of headlights pouring from the river's edge. 68 STORAGE The baffled translation of souvenirs. The other lives we've shed like mayflies risen out of one kind of breathing into another, grade school exuvia, vehicular middle life-all trinket gowns thrown away, and this simply by being in time. River gallop, epochs, years, seasons, ice suddenly suffocating the macadam and then drifting. The curtains are tied back, but sway in the draft, faintly disintegrate. We keep our things in boxes, piles, bags. The basement is racked with our former selves. dawn. Before-dawn dawn. I am matroshkya, but cannot contain my inner dolls, only the traces of her in plastic storage bins. And with her and her, then and then-mixed tapes curled in on themselves like the secret of ammonite, knowing they are pre-post-matter. Spooling the silent z-spin of time. We amass these evermore wraithlike things because we think it is important to keep in mind the bodies we have carried, the hands we have held, actions vestibuled and written into cloth. We think we will go back, page through these tectonic shells-geography tests, action figures, letters that drowned us in inversion, bits of colored plastic. Flotsam that rises only in our hands, splayed out on the living room floor like fossils that cannot be reconfigured into a dinosaur, a dinogirl, a diagram of everything. The ink fades in the dark like a live thing. Sometimes I fantasize about such a whole spool, a string strung out of me like a spider's web since my birth, something that has tracked my every move, can show me at satellite-distance the shape I have made in the world with my movements. Maybe it looks like a constellation with a discernible outline-lotus, frying pan, mythic body, goat. Or maybe my wanderings are so small that they make only a small dark circle, like a pile of deep purple yarn. Placenta. Filigree stills me in its center of doubling back. 69 CUL DE SAC SONNET We drag the mattress into the night. Hour of duration and mulch. Stomata opening. Dandelions sift moonlight through yellow tendril-skirts, clavata swelling the horizon. To remember the house, just feet away, is difficult. Electricity hollows the inside ember like quiet hammers of demolition, jolt of magnetism. How it is a barb of emptiness that holds us down. Lust for mineral beds, thick debris, the arb-itrary steaming fractures. We trust the sudden animal arc of our hipbones, the androgyne bloom of subsoil moans. 70 LOVE LITIGATES LIKE THIS: sugar sugar sugar go go go sheet sheet sheet I dip my felt-tip face to your page and let all the ink in me run out, leave a dark & rebel stain. The heart beats so bloodily, so why can't we feel the blood along the arteries, the perpetual massage of living? We talk with the pulp of fruit in our mouths through the chain-linked fence of our faces, quaint the ceremony. Beauty persists, you remind me, and the little moons in me chuckle, tug at the intricate rug of ocean that is your heart, immense serenity & torrent vast. In my dreams my gypsy emotions are pumping gas, preparing to look for you, some deeper truth, away from this sexual grind of glimpses. This morning I woke with your voice, but then, I opened my eyes & it drifted as if realities are only made of corneal playthings - Your voice is at least ten swallows emerging from a chimney. I have never in all my poeticizing produced or erased a piano, and yet, when you say something, suddenly, tangibly, I can feel the piano press in all around me as if I were born in it all along. I move, and despite myself, a key twists out a sharp note, a sustained note - the crescendo comes. At night when your fingers drum on your chest in a small incision of light, you remind me of my own imminence. My dependency clinks & chatters its teeth. Can you hear its minute vocabulary of come? This is just to say: I pledge allegiance to your maverick canon, 71 your anthro-apology, your peculiar thirst. It's a rather small church- just the revered-one and the reverer. 72 [SALVAGED IN ASUNDER] were it not for the shifting blues in lakes dark sky scalloped by bats glint of glass insulators available sugar nerve endings mossed inside skulls were it not for the numbers we memorized and swapped the necklaced numbers tugging of streams translucent hair suspended were it not for the mending of roots airbags fuss couriers blinking gust layers of gauze beauty held bubble-like beneath the tongue mantelpiece turpentine bewildered with red were it not for the panting of dogs silence of celery hurricane birds barrettes downpour the corrugated unanswerable density copulatory song rafters were it not for the surprise salmon breaking open the surface steam adjustable knob mischievous mammals rest stops plumbing squash grasp tears communicable life were it not for the swelling of fruit and injury and the body into a body brittle drafts the inner electricity that lifts us up off of our knees 73 GOD SHARD In the interest of honesty and poor syntax this will be streamed from a secret excess in tiny pauses. That there were influences kills any subtlety of attempt. A literal eye screams for emphasis- for a field of field to become crucial, convinced that metaphors crucify space. But without you I am condensed to a single point, lobster tail in my mouth. An eliminate beyond. An illicit still. The scene is fleeting before resuming, lost somewhere between the fervor of a minister and abysmal lyricism. Bodies blow back against the vaulted ceiling of our memory, leave the soul irreligious & flapping, and finally we swallow. 74 THE ICE FIELDS at first water trills the air- fragments bleed down, silt jotting on vinyl siding-a prayer of accident. roots ravenous, but sipping. night presses amorously against our unsleeping lawns, untwines lust and °C. Then things divide- everything is trapped under ice, coincides with silence, Saturn. thin parable of belonging. nasturtium unopened, double-lidded, pits like small beacons pulsing above the sealed sidewalks. darkness hides the birds amid icicles, and the world yields one electric cable at a time. moonlight becomes schizophrenic in the sum, glancing off of the eye of everything, impromptu mirror. we are careful, brace each other, slip on the surface over the surface. we are warned, hinderlings- the asphalt calling to us, dangerous little chrysalis spreading 75 ITHACA FALLS It is hard to sleep when I smell water falling all around me, the air smoldering with mist, so I walk out again into the night, pilfered light hooked into the elms, to one of the thundering cataracts of this small city of waterfalls. A river daughter hangs her hair over sheer drop off and it tangles into dark knots almost clots under the surface before loosening into wet kisses along the banks. There is no guillotine that can cut falling from fallen. The present and future roil together, then float as streamers down the long calm of remaining into the past. Further out blond fields of corn give up their ghost when the wind shakes it out of them. Here, spray bewilders the air, carries the rumor of oceans: everything is shipwreck and habitat, such hovering music. If I stare at it long enough I can't tell if the page of water is being written or erased, but I know I share its turbulent fidelity, its stuttering. Moonlight tries to intertwine in the fall, but the water just drops its mirrors, one after another, into trespass. And suddenly you are there, my love, the nectar-stained glossa of bees all about you. When I lean back into you, the water dreams of mercy. Shining translates into soft moss clinging to rock, green gratis. I dip my foot in, watch the water plunge into itself, contradict the notion of a self separate from what it wades through. Magnolia petals like bits of eggshell mosey downstream, flood the damp darkness with scent. The flowers, we understand, are made of sparks and wetness, and the sun, as ordinary and forgiving as ever, draws near. 76 [BUT THE RAIN IS FULL OF GHOSTS TONIGHT] and it has taken something from me, driven my feet from the earth, tendered a gift that displaces me. The water pours through where-I-was like a lesson no one will tell me-a breaking up by filling. Each droplet glints like the eyes I have consented to and then let go of. Because even your deepest stare could not stitch me to the landscape. This rain, and its interminable music, at once initiates loss and turns from it. I try to gather its signatures, but they come undone like parachutes without bodies. How can I step through this gauzy curtain toward you? What in the world is so adamant about division? Cars continue to butt their way through delicacy, leave tiaras of smoke in the falling. Love, do not turn blindly from evidence-there it is-time as obvious oblivion . . . and repair. Time touchable, drinkable, blitzed. The mangy cat huddles itself under the cold engine and the awnings are full of compliance. Now is the era of standing apart from it because the wetness makes us suffer too close to eternity. Can you feel the terrific weight of its accumulated utterances? Still, it feels so buoyant in my hand- the umbilical (or elevator shaft) of heaven yielding to space-O innumerable pollinated yeses 77 NOTES CENTRALIA, PA: a small coal town, where a trash fire ignited a vein of coal in 1961. Over fifty years and 40 million dollars later the fire still burns under the town. THE TRILLING WIRE IN THE BONE: The title is a variation on a line from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets (Burnt Norton). These lines belong to: A bracelet of bright hair about the bone: John Donne, The Relic; The prayer of the bone on the beach: T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (The Dry Salvages); The wonderful fish-like economy of her [the] lower back, Linda Gregg, Aphrodite & the Nature of Art. FATAL LIGHT AWARENESS PROGRAM: FLAP is an organization, formed in April 1993 to find a solution to birds dying from colliding into skyscrapers. During migration seasons, FLAP volunteers patrol Toronto's downtown core in the early morning hours to rescue live birds and collect the dead ones. ARCHAEA: A unique group of microorganisms. They are called bacteria (Archaeobacteria) but they are genetically and metabolically different from all other known bacteria. They appear to be living fossils, the survivors of an ancient group of organisms that bridged the gap in evolution between bacteria and the eukaryotes (multicellular organisms). The name Archaea comes from the Greek archaios meaning ancient. ARDENTIA VERBA: (noun, latin) words that burn; glowing language. [BUT THE RAIN IS FULL OF GHOSTS TONIGHT]: This title comes from Edna St. Vincent Millay's Sonnet XLIII.