first drafts.

but you, you are hearing the molecules of paint on our porch deck sing in the stillstrong sunlight.

we are not after truths. we are after the image of truths. we are safer in the image of the image of truths. what we know is forgettable and what we don't know we live our lives scared to forget. we are in a place between forgettable knowledge and forfeited knowledge. no door of any width, no squeeze of any heart will free us. once we are gone once we are no more less than we were. from nothing to never silence shame. we see only the image of wounds, and the image of the image of unforgiving fathers, slow-dying in firelight.

how did we come to lie here on our backs, with eyes shut against the light? I feel for your hand. getting warmer, warmer you say. I am hungry and this hunger is a circle we can't step out of. listen, I can hear the circle now it hums and far in the beautiful(beautiful) distance we hear our children, and we can go back to sleep for a little while longer.

the dog quietly approaches and understands I will ignore her until water boils and beans are obliterated.

stepping      steeping, stopping,             stooped on exponential       s         l          o            p              es we lope. we are short-lived as isotopes,  insoluble and obstinate, rather like precipi            tates.

we descend to the river before dusk and before the children can remember who they are and will become. through pleated mist, some eagles, and then silence. even trees stop dropping their leaves. we climb onto what glaciers discarded, and leap as we always do: erect and with mosquitoes in our hair.

all at once, butterflies. a colony of white wings beating,  a million soft breaths over the darkening bay, bound for the outer islands: those black eyebrows hiding something below the water line.

We always forget what April does until it does it and it does it to remind us of motions set long ago, of wobble, of our planet unwinding through space to this place to displace one memory for another.  April's light will flatten us against the rocks, peel our winter bark, put spring in our steps.

there is something i haven’t said haven’t shed  haven’t shared there is nothing i haven’t cared to tell you here this night this warmth our blood our warmth our somethingfears that worm their way into our notsaid words and while we balance here suspended never wishing for an end it cuts  into our eyes and us in two into the deeper meanings of our fears can we walk together out of these woods? will you wait for me at the edge? these unsaid suspensions that refuse us the courtesy of dropping these drops of notdones and oncedones while we iterate and iterate the tape that separates where it once held us together by our unsaid undones we balance here on suspended unsaids unwinding the light of this uncut moon this white yolk that offers no warmth or regard that owns nothing that borrows light but can’t hold on to it this unheld light unwinding between us borrowed and suspended

Yes. Break your mirrors. Especially any that are rear viewing.

words that fall around our legs, syllables contract, relax. we bend our words, our legs, always stepping slowly.

I hadn't given it much thought until you wrote. It disturbs me to think others would claim (and apparently have already claimed) my work as their own. I would appreciate help from anyone to identify acts of plagiarism of my writing. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

on the shore of my dream we don't struggle                          so much. the moon pulls                more fiercely, yes, so that      our blood rises,            yes, but we still manage                      to speak                                 in low voices while the ocean sends cellophane             fingers                   to wrap around our ankles, intent on dragging us awake.

your absence piles into me: a cotton sheet along my back. in the afternoon, I will declare myself lonely (to myself), at night I will sit and write poems to you and re-enact your hair.

because i understand loneliness to be a measure of the distance from yourself, and madness just sanity with teleconferencing, that’s why i let you pull me, ear by ear, toward a prior dream.

Thank you!