on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

Lily of the Valley

Gouache on paper, 2015

The only piece of advice I’ve got for anyone is to shout your precious name into the rain & wait for a response. I’ve never been good at caring very much about language except when it matters the most. Look up. The sky has never seemed bigger. Days when clouds are so low it’s like the air is a ghost & every person is a ghost & in a way that’s almost comforting, bodies aren’t really bodies at all. When you meet a body or a boy in the street so long after the light has gone & every star seems amazing. The sky as an appendage to a whole other life. Have you ever thought of the galaxy as something so infinitely big it’s almost irrelevant. Bodies that whisper at night like something amazing. Like every sad poet, I am obsessed with the sky at night. As if we could ever forget the horned moon of our ancestors. My language has been called diaphanous & imprecise. But you can cut into it with a knife. When I look at a magnificent white museum with so many dead objects I can only think of it collapsing into a vicious ocean. Water will exist long after we do. When my body exists, I can feel something warm as water swell up in my chest as if remembering some primordial dream. We whisper to each other in the dark as bodies do & the lights flicker on. This is how electricity works in cities that haven’t heard voices in thousands of years. Imagine this planet once the world has grown through it again. I feel bloodless. I feel like the dust that created the universe. The earth as all sea, just like Ovid imagines it. The ocean as one gorgeous excuse for drowning. I feel like the water inside of me. I turn to the boy or body in the street & beg Tell me something real Tell me something real & from nowhere, an answer I will take you to it & I will take you to it & I will take you to it & I will take you to it—

                                                   turn into a palomita and rise, rise into

                                      smoke, a burn scar

                        a child’s daydream: am I becoming, have I begun