
Your Clothes in Tatters
I.
...skyward, lying on our backs listening for rainfall,
lying, we the ones of loitering, of settling into the longing for dreams to overtake us,
asking if anything could overtake us,
this overwhelming desire, this yearning for...
wind through leaves,
river’s gentle susurrus,
sound of wood knock on water
...grey morning we thought
we had done away with,
grey morning we thought
we’d awoken from, thought we’d overtook,
grey morning as any morning known
before, we having dwelt here before,
having been...
who says that words aren’t accurate,
who says we cannot know,
as in the mind
and its accuracy, its perception,
as in the nouns
and their reflections,
only in this reality and its becoming
...sky grey above the dark grey waters,
river meeting grey horizon,
meeting leaves folded into
compacted grey gravel, we folded into
one another awaiting some unfolding, some development,
awaiting something other than what we have,
something other than
where we’ve been, what we’ve known...
II.
wet leaves turning to black
against gutter
fey light evening out
branch against cement
your language moving across
as if we’ve had some choice
in the asking where have you been
if to speak is to speak the truth
this the rain falling that hadn’t fallen
this the same world
Into the Slow Air
you’ve looked away
as a barbarian stranger looking,
your voice clotting in words
other than english,
full of departures,
barbed half-light across
your face taken up by sleep,
your words knotting
like weedy grass.
blackened sticks lie in fireplace.
this language wrenching already,
this light seemingly apart
from mine in the open globe
of dawn verging on pale roseate.
it's snowing again
and I can’t get around it,
the molecule of its own cloth
cresting again and drawing out.
the coffee drips
and the snow comes.
you’re looking out at me
and there’s a feeling in it, of it.
Current or Currently
we stood outside, beneath an oil white residence
as it began to rain.
we could hear the echoes of boys playing
in the almond eyed shade
like a tracing of tempo, back and forth,
willingly spoken to dry eyes.
this killing is an open gate,
it is but a riddle,
is but a book about hope
in memory’s negative.
we might have talked but we found
it unattended, a personless
city made only of wood and words
and stone, and there’s
an ash in the air at night now, among the rows
and rows of almond trees.
I kept thinking, as I listened to the careful
clicking of your tongue
on your teeth, that your hair is not brown,
so much as it might be
a purified bursting, a system crashing,
a forging of the purely spacial
into a structure so much like a world.