yesterday i read through old journals and found a pair of pages
that don't connect anymore. i could have torn them out. you
are a new book. in my hands i am balancing a new lexicon
like the unfolded corners of a cut diamond.

hold them -- my hands --
i don't want a witness, i want
you.

do you always start with the eyes?

i held your stories in my hands the way children hold frogs or birds
thumbs gentle touching their necks, feeling their nervous
pulses. how they beat past mine quick the way a skyline flickers
in the distance. from my perch atop a bluff. in the damp grass
with a bottle of wine and cold cold skin, how the night comes
to spell out the last of winter for me
in the vapor of my breath, its
february, not may.

this week i heard our eyes rhyme
and it sounded sweet, but you used a word
i didn't understand. my thumbs tapping
on your neck, i didn't ask the meaning.
i'll be sounding the vowels for days.

3803

Smoke looks different on the horizon than it does on the news.
and dust on my father's clothes
I didn't know what I was seeing, I laughed
tracing gravity with two pencils on my desk,
they drew the blinds on the windows but not

on the television or newspapers

or the sky thick with two hundred and twenty stories
on shredded paper. I had never read them.
Almost one thousand three hundred and forty-four people
were trapped burning on the top of the world
in less than a minute
and I was asked if I was alright.
I was asked to leave the room.

What did I know about war?
my mother wanted me home.

Leaving the hills at dusk, Sunday

Can you believe the half-moon
on this half-spring night?
And the stars -- I can count them with my numbers
and sound them aloud -- pendants
in space crisp as the air on my tongue.

My fists in my pockets,
I taste that God the anchor of reality
weighs nothing.

we have built a dock of sand

island of many hills

the stone has been poured. cracked.
pile together in puddles. salt makes patterns when the snow dries. a growing moss of pounded newspaper. i saw a reservoir in the sidewalk, it has been drained
there is a shape under the planes of gray, there was a beach, a marsh, a leaf

behind the tile tunnel and beneath the slab, there, not there

yesterday they poured a second cast, a third, a fourth.

corridor

notes:

leaning and wheezing number one bus:

sound of brooklyn dawn

two days ago i followed route 26 and watched the earth open up. warm springs. pavement on an ancient trail, a reservation. basketball in the shade of a cliff, white crosses and flowers on yellow earth, a low fence on a massive incline. we own this. rocks. horizon tumbling into clouds, disappearing.

blinking and rolling route 26

emblems of my worst

Ginger tea,
jars on the sill,
flowers