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Night-swimming with my sister who stays back by the shore

The force that gets the body out of the soul

What’s personal is what you hold in your hand

A bottle of catsup The pour of green water

If I were to escape beauty into the season of giving

I would give to the birds, the sad, and the leaning.

I would use simple language to describe the forest. Failing that,

I’d find a piano. Nickel body, nickel world

You are a figure illuminated from behind by a light.

The underbelly of sunset The rattling of blue logs.

The house is over. That is, what you never went back for

has been loaded into a dumpster. A bridge is an arc of green lights

over black water. This is memory weather, and I remember

the roof in summer. How it stood. How we stood upon it.

I waited to somehow divine what it was. Be invited. Still I imagine a great expanse, a meadow, high above the town, of tiny flowers, like lovers on their backs, looking up.

the sounds a house makes or when thunder crawls the hills.

Bees, in golden thunder, sift through black-eyed Susans. As a hawk’s shadow stains the clearing

jays, sparrows, cowbirds, doves spiral up through leaves.

One finch stops to forage in red monarda. These birds know their world exactly,

where it's best to live and hide. Each morning I scatter seeds and crumbs

because that yellow bird in scarlet flowers amazes me. All I am to him

is scent, noise, food. So I hold these limitations in my arms

for one essential daily moment.

Darkness frees them.

There is love comes late, in darkness, and gives no reason. Body speckled, sweet as a pear. How nakedly the heart bears its weight.

At dusk, deep in the summer woods, a silence. Something that was here, expected to continue being here, isn’t.

I see the line in my palm etched by fate and not yet snipped. The afterlife, what is it if not a further body desire turns toward?

No clear edge to the universe, now the scientists tell us.

They describe an intense fuzziness instead. World spins into other worlds as incandescent as what arises from cocoons ripening on the underskin of leaves and stars.

She’d belt her brassy voice over the waves’ backbeat. No one sings better than her.

Would she ever bite the inside of her cheek?

Would she yell at the moon to quit tugging at her hem, or would she whistle, drop her blue dress and shimmy through space to cleave to that shimmer?

What did she mean to say that morning she spit out the emaciated whale wearing a net for a corset?

All this emptying on the sand. Eyeless shrimp. Oiled pelicans.

Within her jaws the coral forests, glittering fish, waves like teeth, her hungry mortal brine.

And a voice came And a voice said

MAGNIFY MY EYE MAGNIFY MY EYE MAGNIFY MY SURFACES CAPACITY FOR BEAUTY

or it rides us like a torrent. Blurs and fastens, flesh to seconds. Just look at your veins. In vespertine woods, I tried to read moss by hand. There's something laconic about green that I need.

Lover, let the morning slow time through the branches.

For the last minute to turn home. By heart He knows the tilt and decline of each field, His own faulty predictions. The well Hoards its shadow while a raw haze gluts

With harvest, with guessing rains, presses As the temple and wrist. The pastures, tired Of abiding, begin to burn. Gold takes over, Loose, unguarded. Cows stay deep

In the chafe of underbush; reckless leaves shawl The edges, unaware of the sap that will send them down.

Blades of aging and magnetic August grass pull at their fruits harsh winds pass through insects fading like light

With shiny, green and rounded sounds I tumble exorbitantly into a human being

At night the vast soaring waters rise around the island where I am

And I want to see you who turned your back your clear outlines so deeply etched that even my sleep is too wide for just one Come into it!

A sun-patched leaf sails alone toward September singing something I can't hear only a cool humming— The Loneliness gives off your returning

There's not enough room for me in the wind that seized the leaf —you don't know where you are here, how far

You walk around as though split into many little white shimmering guests that rest in a dilapidated house, not spoken to the wood of its lumber too tired to speak using the heavy bodies of strangers as they tighten around their smiles

The house wants to enter them! Lean on their foreheads, listen, belong