1.

we, clouded with error

create from the language of breath

 

an earth, murked without 

wisdom but the reaching

of so many hands – they curl, 

emptied between each finger, 

and even the dirt does not 

stay for long

 

what else have we failed? The 

human forest, mutilated and 

forgettable as the waters we stare 

into, briefly, through childhood

 

     attempting to pin something 

like an insect

                        to memory

 

but they slip, all things slip 

and I do not even know to 

grab them

        from the soil 

again

 

so they rot there, lonely as I – as we

who disparage and lose all are –

 

the roots scrape over our 

       absence, we are eaten for 

       love

 

the wolves are tamed 

there is no more song

 

–what were you saying?

 

 

2.

it has been so long, Eros

if you came here now, would I recognize you?

 

the bells withdraw into dawn like so many stars wilting over the

dissection of flowers, the splintering spirit, the despairing disguise

 

here marks the lover’s dying gaze – who could turn from this horror?

many times it happened, gain and loss, the inevitable exchange

of isolation

 

and so it will continue, like the crunching of bones beneath a dragon’s

great feet, the dead smell of sun on woodlands, the absent tenderness

 

of a ship’s stiff sail pulled on by no wind, so sitting, listless and

maimed by its own still reflection, erroneous as my breathing

 

the dream wilts below the heat of its chainmail, with the skull 

removed, the flux that flows is like that of a once-hidden wound

 

I wait and wait, never truly dispelling my want for someone to look 

in and see, but acceptance, pulsing somewhere, is strange to me

 

and only doubts are left to accumulate – do the dead tire of lilies?

passions, various, leave me; against my wishes, the light was never

        kind

but somewhere, the sea churns, the earth, like a beast, slinks onward

along the great plummeting brow of an indifferent universe and

 

all my bundled hopes, neat as the folded wings of an unsent letter, 

root their day-blanched thoughts to dirt and carry away rumors

of me, somewhere, to be known

 

 

3.

april comes, her arms molded with the longings of magnolia 

the animal secludes itself, a single throat, and so whispers into 

the dark: I have witnessed eternity

 

where I have gone, I have gone alone – there is no one to cast

pity on the stony palm of all my errors or know how each smudge of

dusk expends itself like a heart for nothing

 

no dreams, no agelessness, nothing for the world to remember–

when did I ever cast a shadow? when did I know a thing that did 

not prove itself to be false? the footsteps, love’s lure

 

that embittered itself – again and again – on the landscape of a window

never looking out; this is my singular belonging, this room, this color

the ghosts that come and go, watching me flail from life to life

 

the woods speak, the sky’s infinite armament disarms itself,

the earth is sickened with what the impossible seems to promise 

spring, you come,

 

but my Eye is shut

 

 

the constellations, weary with what they’ve seen 

collapse in the pulse of all

that is not here

 

dark, the cloven hoof

black the spread of crocus like disease

 

I have been past

what you hear in the final chamber

 

I know the hollow throat of a door 

that can only rasp itself

closed

 

there are riddles in the ribbon that yawns 

itself into puddles of sunlight on the floor, 

each animal despairs of them

 

the traps are set, the ankle is weak 

where I go I go alone and into 

every disclosure

 

pale peony, 

I obscured

by the sound 

of rain

 

what comes after 

sorrow? you leaf through

me like an

animal body

 

I burn yellow with the 

hot, restless empire

of eternity 

each grief

disembodied, how 

to whittle out from 

the paper souls a 

hope for more?

 

 

somewhere, I am loved but the black 

leaves pool in and cloud the promise

 

it is a form of suffering: the body’s defacement 

into armor, the unsent letters piled on the field 

like so many dead

 

geese pushing out from the marsh 

into lands forever beyond me

 

like grief, the season burns, I have been theft

of a name easily called or remembered the rot of 

intimacy,

       do you remember the spires we touched 

while the moon still bred tenderness?

 

like all else, I question 

the fruits I carry home

 

they slip from my arms and 

I grow old