I place
the tip of my finger to your iris
The clocks are not relevant A pearl
quavers in each second Space
is exhausted with light breath

Everyone small and lost I
ask you to return The sky dilates
the dog star It’s not good or bad
I think of death and a perfection like

brightness imposters the flourescence of masks
Everyone invisible even you You
are touch and lightly everything
beautiful

Cegeste

what I write suggests

the careless fingertip of music,

the weight and light of vision:

your arms raised, crossed above

your hair: the movement, the inhalation of rain.

what you have said is lace fallen,

music, white and all silence in music.

the blue and carnal stillness of my eyes,

a thousand in the morning a thousand.

who weaves this mirror in this fabric

who places their hand to the glass?

the smell of one woman.
the way one woman walks.
a shadow not on the wall.

you bring the ocean
in the window in the window
a cloud. in the expanse of an iris

a child, the word love,
a lie so pure
its light is paint.

I am not this not this
poet not this man
not this ravenous smoke of body

not thirst not a peal of glass
not the smell
of love of woman

not the vacant silhouette of ache.
my name
is anything but what it is.

whites clear as starlight colors
bright and precise as caresses and precise

as what resembles caresses when alone
with the television in an arena of candles

watching the bald eyes of stars alert
as the scenes of dreams do you

remember how the hand moves how clouds
stream through the minds of trees

as morning breaks on the television
in the teeth of the models

At the end of our flesh
we are names. I, the cold
the appearance, breathe
what is glass to the sky
and am ageless
I know its color. I bled it.

The April sun is over me,
the new canopy of the birch
is full of its light.
The river is close.
She’d say the color is never,
it’s never the same.

The river is a white serpent
it runs it runs it slithers
on through to the very dark back
of its word where its pulse
is relentless and its skin is
water is scale is betrayal.

The crows scream wheeling
above the frail canopy simmering
the crows are wheeling the sky
is a scream.

No
I know your language.
You are stone.
You are water.
Birch stretch for light in late afternoon.
She thought the sky was blood was
skin would say
look
how blue at the end of the winter.

The birch have bled,
it is the river.
Even tranquility has a pulse.
Water courses blood courses
I walked out of the flesh to my name.

I feel the sun on my arms
I know I am here she would say
look how blue and become
a little more insane.
I know I am here.

I know your language.
The birch around me are the photographs
are stone are her eyes in the morning
in the water are pale are salt
in the mouth of the sky.
I know I am real.
I have light on my arms.
I know I am real
the river is fire my fingers are fire.

I feel it coming it is coming
like a train like a river
at the end of the winter
she would say in my flesh
look how blue
in the pale eyes of the birch.

I have the sound of her name.

I.
waking in the first silhouettes
of dawn we draw one another
out of our warmth and rising
to the door find it open the air
cold and chantarelles somewhere

somewhere on a hillside in dew
and we call them
suns with our lips and teeth
while around them miles of cypress
disappear in their light

II.
waking earlier than you I watch as
through the single pane of our single
window the morning empties
the room where the shadows mass
where I am with the knives too often
sharpening
listening to myself realize what I lose

while your skin asleep in the pale
tenderness of this day’s first color turns
from the stare of its word and pulls
closer the light it casts

III.
we rise together as the cypress
climbing out of the black seed bed
in autumn and need nothing and listen
to the wren alone calling the water
silent on its stones

drifting brilliant cedar
top. a clearing glimpse. the
shocked
aphotic recess where ink damp

flowers.
where you land.

and nothing to say no point
to make to anyone I need
and fuck if I wouldn’t rather feel
like this all the time?

dad one way
the eye vacates a marble suddenly
not
listening the arm grip barely hard
enough to suggest something else.

dad how can I
say this
live red leaves on the back
of the hand I wouldn’t take.
the way she talks.
the way her eyes move.

dad I broke
my hand in the clear pool again.
this helpless appetite makes the temper relentless.
would you tell me how to believe
I am this man?

dad a
cliff. blue. shells of wind stressed
houses and a friend in the first door.
someone in the door.

embraces the olive trees
in the grove by the highway
a pomegranate disappears
a terrible fear maddens the bull

the girl beside me removes her glasses
and faints into the failing light whispers

in a hot dream about the quarrel and the moaning
of an olive tree there is immensity
and no one in the olive grove
a white bull removes his eyes

our silence arrives in the houses
engulfed in a glass white note

held by the singer forever a beautiful
fear of the air has a taste a profile
of an olive tree a bull without
white eyes running in the grove

crimson light blushes on the highway
and the sunset is not understandable the red

flesh of the pomegranate she removes
the skin and bites her mouth is hot
the girl beside me removes her palms
from my eyes in her voice

the harmonium and the houses squinting
by the olive grove the land is gentle

her eyes superb and unrecognizable
mothers are stringing their voices
from the clotheslines we move toward
the lovely instruments

waiting in the ghetto watching
broken men shuffle in and
out of traffic. the police
bald in the alley.

are you a cop?

eyes light inches
from my window. body
tense to run.