At the place where no thoughts descend
I am waiting, I am petting a tiger
the shop-lined streets are alive with explosions
trash-can lids and mailboxes
careening over broken glass

I'm knitting you a nun's habit
for a sister the world has not yet seen
at the place where thought
falls out of language the drum
is an erotic tantrum
is two bats grappling down the air
finders tweaked by global interference
whistle on whistle down
to the earth roamed by skunks
long lines of blackwhite fluff babies
following so many mothers

at the point where no music rises
to take the place of silence
I am following the boards of a grey dock
toward you and all your colors
you with rags from head to foot
that look like satin.

river pools
the veiled sky passes over
paths rich in mica

standing on a pile of barnacles
we hold hands hearing throats erupt
in the water

arm in arm on the concrete everywhere
there's air left to breathe
make me part of the car when we leave
the streams behind in red light
and the movie theaters go past for years

we lasso each other under a scaffolding
come out into a smashed courtyard
where the cracked fountain bubbles
and a big invisible wheel turns in the walls

wondering
do we erode time as we pass through it

___________________________________

at the place where all roads collapse we
built a featherbowl
vast as the sky's reflection in a small pond

floated forestkisses, while beavers & their teeth
waited to get rid of us

they felled the trees where we live
their beaver huts were stripped
raw to the wood our eyes gave us

at the place where woods go golfcourse
and streams to water cooler
a shadow sliced the cords
that'd pulled our feet through their plans
we were a barrier between
daylight & more daylight

the huts waited
an afternoon was pelted by transparent hexagrams
felled all the trees into the featherbowl
apartments in flame
we took off for foreign moons.

_____________________

hacking at time daily
we try to live outside the ages

I pick wilting wild flowers
you steal a flask from a dim shop

feed my bed's mouth
to sedate the pretty windows
that bring us an ancient light

we observe the younger planets
love on their crusts
you take your grandmother's sowing kit
from a trapdoor into the attic

knit us both kimonos
each stitch hidden
like the circuitry that keeps us
from eternity to entwine

go as far into total ecstasy
as the rent will allow
yearning for a day
that redeems all days
and the wildflowers
stiffen on my ghostly desk
where nightly I carry your girl's body
and your old man's eyes into song

and even as we cradle each other's
best bodily moments
in this rigged oasis
we are tramping sidewalks outside

strangers to the ice age
beneath a shared lace-edged
white umbrella

first brother and sister
to the strays that live
in the shadows of banks
where accounts ran out
like parched canals long ago

I hold the spine of your dress
as you lean to pet
the crowd of kittens
peering from a constructed ditch
one winces at my cigarette
I spit it out
into a maze of channeled steam

we cast our nets on the nowhere
gather a nucleus
from which we are born screaming
and lipsticked, fern-lashed, salt painted

in the moss-lined cavern of a glacier
we are vamping it up
for a night on the last lit town.

ECSTASIS

winding around my loneliness
the streets of a small town,
salting the graveyards
so that nothing can spring from the dead,
paleness lies down on the grass
and anoints the fallen crabapples,

I think of your hands folding expensive paper, a sitting room
materializes around my multitude of ears
that pick up voices you've left behind
and jet them over the harbor in a radio flame,
we're descending the seas already breathless

blooming shafts of crystalized light
into the mouths of each other's presence
among the sunken wrecks, we are wearing
the same clothing as the old hulls,
we're young in the water, we're young
in the water, we're young in the water

______________

I am a ghost in my mother's house
and a blaze in my father's
a sinew of raw flame through
libraries of plastic wrap volumes

to your absent harpsichord blessed is she
to your silent grandfathers
blessed is she among their murmuring
to push you into a pool can see
your pigtailed eyesburst blessed is she

among both heathen & devout, dragging
an old goat by the ankles
blessed is she with both the numerals
and the eye that journeys through salad,

blessed is the belly of
the morning about to simply turn over

_______________________

in the film sky strings were vibrating,
a goddess pharoah came out of the screen blinking,
it was a field day for psychopaths of all types,

when suddenly the mammal cackling
came to a cease, humbled, sunless and unwoven,
prison chainlink squawking, nine moons
out in the hot afterbirth, sirens calling
to the lashed ears of melted wax,

in an undulating forest
bricked over with extra light
I was protected by lizards & phantoms,
muffled shrieks of machinery, the yawning doors
began to sag, I went around the treehouse
emptying ashtrays and wishing someone would come over
and sleep next to my sleeplessness with me

in the film sky talons are emerging
through cloud fauna, afterlives
expanding throughout the commercial area,
a day of all smoke hovering under a single lamp,

the hallway opened, shopping cart derelicts
pushing heaps of dry goldenrod, torn bags
wrapped 'round wild leeks, video bundles,

blood smoulders singing through the bodily chords
of back-up dancers, a light closed,
a light opened, the multitude of multitudes
came in, frozen free of their banners,
tearing long strings of globed lights
from their gelatin forms.

__________________

arcs corresponding to the body's passage through
dull flicker light of all earth

time capsules passing through each life,
deposited there by a wind from the heart

all days weighed down by a reasonable belief
in time, squirrels chomping anxiously there
in the naked background

days jagged with light, pressed
close upon other days, fireworks stuck
raptured in the air

TEAKWOOD KIDS

flapping wings in a broken network
whole generations of sex spies, broken conquerers,
flying through brick walls , ceaseless ascending particles,
rumored flakes of tawny light
scraping hours free of a wormhole,

you thought my body into your sight
you scoured the drains for a trace of it, wanting,
poked holes in the bedroom walls of a great empire,
tore down the flags around a human heart
found land outside land, wandered, wandered,
wandered.

BRIGHT DIVIDERS

I'd cut up my life and yours
into radiant compartments,
I'd break the ground into discs
for your feet to float over,

horseflies with small eyes of men
clamoring on all the screens,
a frantic derby whirling
in a telescopic wood

the life of paint and the kisses
shouldered within it
as pigeons nest in the alley

the short arms and the long
arms of violence fly off,
roadsign stalks cut down
by a small wind.

RIVERBRIDGE

I gaze into the emptied canal
I want to drape your naked body in silk
a magnet deep in the broken rock
has latched onto my heart

lie down in your tight room to hear
tiny noises of human life
I'll be waiting in a small boat
way up behind your left ear

mirror hair blown back by tobacco
who has loved the grandmother of children
she who struck deep into a striker
leveled the flowers on living ground

to lie down with a stranger
brought up a bed in ashes
to the height of great forests
and dropped slender shoots
cloud patterns into waiting baskets.

MELTING BRASS

the long night of fury has ended, we entwine
to fall into the ropes of sodom, long shoots
of golden rod pollen up against the early afternoon,
where we embrace the shadows go greenly
in solitude of puddles,

our eyes are captured within them, we are
a webbed umbrella together in a breeze of chased rain,
this twilight falling through will beach the last whale,
we'll hold hands amidst the vast funeral ever happening,
the false smile of a dolphin
that touched from both sides
the ceiling of the great ocean,

sighing we are the breath of this collapsing multitude,
the minds of a deep wood
kissing through fibers and moss
married in the froth of insect birth
enemy lines melted down to railways
cool bodies nude and propane tanks
rusting against the sound of a kiss held long
in the static of a summer rain, hinging

AIRDOME PLACE

droning gardens we thought of a place
where the years would pass by water,
I'm trying to dream your presence
into the chair across from me, stabbed
by a gypsy knife between roots

my death grows fluttery, surrounded
by flowers, rainfall is broken on our backs,

we're annointing each other with white green mud
sand in the shallows of the Connecticut,
come home America, your children have
deep hands in which rivers run.