when feeling is first

"Is the soul solid, like iron? Or is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?"

We raise you towards the dark. May you make of it something else.

                       Light carved out of the darkness a muscled trunk, each clenched limb and the difficult tips of a plain mesquite taking shape over the hard ground where they found him, his eyes wide and his whole body hungering upward, as if he could hear and bear the bird singing unseen deep in those leaves.

sweet metal sweet

Listen, whatever it is you try to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you like the dreams of your body, its spirit longing to fly while the dead-weight bones toss their dark mane and hurry back into the fields of glittering fire where everything, even the great whale, throbs with song.

When I listen to music gardens open out around me, and the melody becomes a flower I hear with my eyes. Sound has an image, and this image has a sound, which slowly gathers momentum like waves, more far-reaching than a literary metaphor. Carnations leave their flower beds and are distributed on the tables of high-class restaurants to compensate a stranger for some forgotten loss, or make a diner waiting for his companion better prepared to face the uncertainties of their encounter. Nobody stops the narcissus listening for hours to a song of joy in the water and believing it is a song of praise. When white lilies fill a room with their huge, pungent scent, I am confused by my thoughts about them, the opposite of violets, which make me pause where two sounds intersect and dissolve, indistinguishable as the tears shed at weddings and funerals, and the opposite of anemones, which are content with a song on the broad margins, a pastorale on the low mountain slopes. All of this is so I can say: the red rose is visible music, and jasmine is a message of longing from nobody to nobody.

I ripped the feather duster apart to make a bird hat to warm my head under the moon. You lined tiny bottles of black currant vodka on the dash where a little gold tray held the gold ring your finger was too swollen to spear & the cigarette holder I took once into the shadows to kiss. * My eye painted church tops where the day before was sky I pushed my body against & the red wall slid gripping air around the stop-sign shaped room. I fell onto a carpet of dying plants & terra cotta, drank a vial of poppy juice & felt 100 hands land on my chest. * There was a knock on but no foot under the door. * The sunset matched my dress & you passed right through me like I’d only ever seen you in a shard of mirror so I stripped nude & knit a new dress from strings I pulled from the couch. * Your camp filled with basketballs & mine with cat fur & shirts sewn from leftover rags we cleaned the house for five days straight with. I remember the particular smudge one song left on my eye & the flashbulb it left in my mouth so now when I open it it blinds. * You took the plant leaf in your hand & stems heaved 100 hands up to the ceiling & I never told you but here I tell you I planted our dust bunnies in the dirt. * It was your booted lower leg I saw reflected, cut off at the foot. I found your tattoos in a cup liquefied, my face oval, blued. I spilled them on my arms & they bloomed dark morning glories.

To wake when all is possible before the agitations of the day have gripped you                   To come to the kitchen and peel a little basketball for breakfast             To tear the husk like cotton padding       a cloud of oil misting out of its pinprick pores clean and sharp as pepper                            To ease each pale pink section out of its case so carefully       without breaking a single pearly cell                    To slide each piece into a cold blue china bowl the juice pooling       until the whole fruit is divided from its skin and only then to eat                 so sweet                          a discipline precisely pointless      a devout involvement of the hands and senses a pause   a little emptiness

You took away all the oceans and all the room. You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it. Where did it get you? Nowhere. You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.

Cypress

Ask me

We sing to each other in pheromone, never certain how message matches to sender. Sometimes we taste our long past’s echo. We cultivate theories on the existence of dry land, spin theologies of loneliness. We hang translucent in love’s deepwater trenches.

Mysteries

Night