Friends falter, meanings empty out.
A new garment of filth
covers the ancient sun.
The frozen sides become
the frozen center.
Clear walls pulse
like amphibian bellies.
Docks of shin bone
stitched together
with eyelashes and nose hairs.
Twilight setups that look like
a milk spill on a rippling tarp
from the mouth of the barn
that never changes,
and the man splitting wood
who never changes, and other
myths going under the leaves
and in large antiseptic rooms
where the hum of time leaving
crashes on spurred backs,
navel orange eyes
and stumped hands
that have done a lot
finding more in their making
more in the caves of their birth
in the velvet pad at the foot
of the air-scraping coral stool
sending up swirls and piped vapors
sending a language of wings
and a dead body breathing
its salt limbs
table of silence scratched through
with its outlet of tumbling needles
propeller of plants and earthen rain
coiled into an asterisk's fist.