.....

On a mattress high above the earth,
birds in human poses pecking at the underside.
A body that stretches and suffers over it all.

Lofted, the voice is a tumult of detuned choirs
streamed from all ages.  Also the namewrecker,
label of the infinite, who takes your wide habitat,
the final suspect, in hooved pursuit,
who eats twilight moving.

Held by no wind, no steeples of moneyed towers
will touch these springs.  Too high to be circled
by vultures, only touched through by unnatural beaks
in a sky that is not chosen.  Azure terror.
Open mist on high.  The grandeur of a painted body
broken for a mirror world that bouquets its reflection
in peacock splinters.

Join me on this rounded rectangle, soaked
with dreamless agony.  The birds are wet and wild
in this teeming season.  Already they have been mentioned.
I feel I have given too much away; also that
I have taken too much.  Unsuspended, we can thrust its
holographic imprint against the distance of the sun.

Stringless and without direct force, we may tumble
the cumulous and be studied by eyeless benevolent things,
while the shell of the planet quakes, while we
travel our separate kilometers.  As if something opened
the core of my spirit and filled it with silence, without which
there is none.  Honeyed love, bespeckled with the madness
of skin, join your bed-thrashed traveller.  I have been in a sky
like the earth's only country, for your outline to eclipse mine
so that I can grow to surround it.

Bring this bed back to its room both poor and luxuriant,
bring this bed to its floorboards and its home on the ground.
Bring this bed back into my body, with its unravelling boost,
together we will make its technology blossom hot moons.

.....

It's a wind mask,
a high silvery sky-thread,
that I am cut to be climbing.
In the winnowing of my foggy flesh
a man is forming underwater.
Yearns for you
to be present onshore,
carries the peaks
of the dying in his look,
says

you and I will meet again
and again: throughout all time
we will never abandon each other.
Sweet implacable face,
grave playful countenance,
bring the set of your bones
to the uppermost layers of the earth,
taste lavender there, the dementia of history
gone market-dry in your eyes, breasts
blazing with oil, laughter far and wide
at the brazen territories forever fading.

Reaching for a rainglass lit
hands already united on the table's middle
galaxies wrenched open in the background,
belly of Jupiter, the bar patio, the disappearing river.
In you the doves beat both upward and downward.

Mere

I went to the water,
to the kissing-place,
to the tendrils for grapes
and the climbers of the river with wings

And felt your presence forever in my body,
past all worlds and awareness,
soft-winged things
moving across the every thought
of our area mirror.

Guardian from the sea--fanged dog
at the edge of your sense--
silence came in
and sculpted you here:
in your face the act of prayer
is before me.
Your tender movements
re-navigate the world,
open leaves and other forms
through the one window
of my being.

The shade of our time
is cast by light on the earth:
may it suffer our caresses completely.

......

like kicking a lion cub in a modern bathroom
the conveyor belts that carry candies from light to dark

the problem of standing at which wild cranes mate
the bold interior of the new to six rust-colored juveniles

at the rings visible in the end grain are other buildings, which rest on another solar system
as the wearer steps and the other--ah--garments you are wearing are

the bonds between them and a white, rubbery snowball would form and
lacewing internal gravity-sensing mechanisms to a barrel roll above

'''''

The possum's tension is not poise.
His back is breathing.
Infinity is not within his eyes.
He flinches on the tar.
I match him for a stillness
then we move.

He's into the bushes, I'm dissolved
to the headlights and concrete.
Cars have killed enough of our kinds,
and he is without what we call,
the drivers are all dead tonight: I think.

'''''

Once in a hotel bed she asked
do I have a glint of stillness
anywhere in me?  You are looking.
The firmament unremaining
flickered through a window.

Is there not a glint of stillness in me now?
A piece of sadness
broken from the human animal?
Twice severed, once powerfully reconnected,
the lone creature.

Let's tramp its tenderness down
into our pine forest.