drifts down, and one by one the hundreds
of china cups upright
for how far, falling. Hours,
now everyone moves
gracefully; now we have some place
to put our dead. How many
pressures their bodies get used to,
the slender necks
of bottles, emerald, intact.
Without air, they hardly know
how wetly they’re under us,
how the verdigrised currents
churn sediment, cracking
watch-faces and tugging laces
loose. In the dream-
coursing that clogs ears,
the greeny-grey where
metal drips and ball-gowns
bloom, whatever wounds
they’ve acquired washed
white, skin-flaps
sealed like fishy lips.
Selenographia
Some of you is lodged,
must be,
somewhere between the sea
of serenity, or the lake of sleep,
or the marsh of sleep, or the sea.
Particles of solar wind, caught,
some whisker of skin fishings,
I don’t know.
I hope not
the sea of cold.
There was so little of you,
barely enough for the buried
crystalline drops we know now
are there, hardly
an ocean of storms.
Honestly,
I know there’s an eye
brightening even when its full
waning’s waned,
albedo of coal,
light of ice,
but I can’t feel it.
Fingers caught in the classroom
door’s heavy hinge, how your sound
tore through me,
knocking loose some stray ovum,
sea of crises, sea of fecundity,
risen and hovering,
not every sound keeps traveling,
some stay, like stoned gall,
bay of seething, straight through
to the bay of the center.
When that shriek descended
to the newly kaleidoscoped car,
many-faceted geodesic dome that propelled you
somewhere,
sea of rains, sea of vapors,
I was no known sea.
How the word
for indigo churning with its back to us means
noting all along at a certain distance.
Now complex eye.
Up there, the air’s so thin
it can’t be mimicked, even in our best vacuum.
Down here, it’s the weight of two boots
on my sternum. Must you
keep orbiting at this
mean distance?
What doesn’t descend,
shouldn’t. If I hadn’t heard
even some of the words, you wouldn’t.
_______ you _______ Kyle?
He was ________ in a car ________.
I won’t accept this moon illusion—
a thing’s not bigger riding the horizon.
There’s only so long I’ll let these
high tides pull.
Are you there, Kyle?
He was singing in a cartoon.
You have fourteen days
before lunar night turns to lunar noon.
Have you heard, Kyle?
He was hardly in a car ever.
I’m still ringing through loose strata.
Laika needs a lullaby and you
used to pet my dog’s soft ears.
Shade
Fingernails under wallpaper
scratching sound like palpable
air, scatter-pattern of hands
behind your headboard, the face
you’re sure—a third floor
window, the peripheral whisked
looking in—what don’t you
believe? A boy the color
of a lightbulb cowering
in the corner of an old
hotel or rounding a wind-licked
house in full flee. Not eyes,
not corpuscles or corpses. The stain
of shape. The sand-scrubbed
rubbed-thin trace of veinery
pressed into stone. A violence
so shattering, his body not bulwark
or ballast enough, the spirit
jerks loose and imprints itself,
releasing his huddled, focused fear
like dust from a hung rug.
Skin icing over nerve, you want
to believe feeling evaporates, leaves
nothing, not even
a wet mark. Emotion a scrim
like early morning mist or just morning
touching bodies in their beds.
The Dead, Dreaming
In this half-gleam
we don’t
sleep, but glisten
continuously.
Where the light
might
—we catch, sheet
lifted and bit
in the pin.
Does it concern you, this
being of one body?
Consider
hair, how much of it
is wind, how the wind
tatters