Aegean
Tang tang tang tang tang tang tang
ting ting ting ting ting
I eat a goat
bite into the flesh
of the spirit on the island
brown-eyed spirit flies
into emptiness
like an empty goat skull
odor of sea shell.
Perpetual Motion
1
You go to the mountains
stretch in the light aquariums
and wait—
stillness turns in its well
2
I touch your face
of rosewood and sap
the last vanished yellow
of sunset on the mountain
the first cellular light of a flank
3
Walking up the mountain
before an avalanche
you'll find the sandstone
of the peak tattooed with waves
The summit moves with the tide.
Chronicle
My great-grandfather dozed after drinking
hot liquor in his dark room full of books
When she entered to wake him without knocking
as she did every night being the first grandchild
he was dead. One fur sleeve touched the floor
Once he carried her in his big sleeve through
cold halls to the kitchen where they were burning
straw. His daughter took her smelling of wormwood
behind the fireplace to feed. It wasn't the same robe
he died in, but the same color and cloth. My mother
really can't remember the smell of lynx, herbs
against moths, nor the slowness of his step
which must have been told.
The Reservoir
1
The reservoir is trying to freeze over
with an expanding map shaped like an angel
Separated lovers on a coast keep walking
toward each other. Low sun reddens
their faces without heat
They are weary of always moving
so seldom touching, but never think
to move inland, massive and stable
Imagoes hatched on thin ice, it's
their illusion membranes are brighter
than occluded flesh of interiors
Membranes have the density
of an edge, and edges violent as lava
2
All day she walked across the tundra
He began to drive away obliquely
at exactly her speed, so she altered
her angle, aiming above him, as in a current
He departed in a zone that solidified
at his whim, so she reached for his hand
Land cracked with their weight. He seemed
to reach toward her, a hand like paper
twisted and folded over, only a surface
with wan modulations, like a map
3
Then she delicately stepped out
toward the edge, tenuous as a leaf
as if waiting for a letter
but it froze too swiftly before her
At dusk his voice broke her concentration
She turned, vexed, and saw he had not spoken.
from The Field for Blue Corn
3
Certain colors are the conversation
we held one dusk, that altered
from the violent afterglow of fresh bones
to the gray corolla of old ones, only minerals
As restless matrices in blue sage dissolved
a horntoad ran under a bush. I insisted it was
a baby bird. Then a baby bird and a horntoad ran out. Now, on a hill I never noticed between two close ones we've climbed, I see at an altered angle. Some small shift in refraction has set the whole plain trembling and hostile
4
I wondered if seasons were invented
by our brain, which is maternal, to soothe
chaotic events, since no springs here
have been alike. Moths swarmed the elm tree
one year, and bees the next, so I thought
it was the teeming, but this year is dry
austere, an anatomical drawing of the heart
taken from life, inaccurate and scientific
Branches without leaves