heart of lungs filling again did you want ease peace a home a place
in this the swallowing element no breath no longer any need did
you want finally to be cradled by something benevolent something
large taken with such strange such falling grace away the body
mimics the heart stutters says sad sad so sad the body swan dives
trips the body falls into such far mornings as this your death
already a year old the tide at slack grief the mist clinging to the fields
the circling hills the body sits with strangers eats blueberries
bluer than your ocean blue as the vacancy sign you never meant
to hang in all our lives the blue of the sky picked up and held
by the water this predawn leak of light so like the tint of your lips
the color of oxygen-lack the final absence of air cyanosis they call it
the heart submerged and drowning the ship of your life going down
cyanosis for this rising storm cyanosis like cyan the printer’s least
stable ink cyan from kyanous which is Greek which just means blue
[To say]
There are dead creatures all over and under this earth
to say your heart is broken is to translocate sorrow
to honor the stutter you carry always in its own cage
beast of the gaps unrested hesitations to say your heart
is broken is to say the river never wanted those particular
dead and is to also say the field full of mice going in fear
of all that has wings is also full of stubble the grain taken
dead and leavened by hands by time to say your heart
is broken is to see inside your mind all that is gone all
that has become the shadow of wings all that will never
again appear to say your heart is broken is to wish to end
the uneven engine mend it into silence or steady purr
is to say something about the difficulty of repair is to say
your heart your memories the field the river the bodies
are all intact and can never be saved no matter what
[Practice]
They keep throwing their bodies at all the versions of water
river lake bath puddle ocean even every snowy hill the children
remember water the children remember and cry carry me
with pursed bird mouths with sharp bird voices with faces
tuned to the looming tide the children practice being creatures
being creatures again the children have already been taught
already know how to fold their bones into clothes lean their
knees into pews their hearts over desks fold hands into attitudes
like prayer cursive or like a fist released into sleep the children
curl fetal again soft again cradled by the hammock moon
the knit mesh of stars nights they write field guides to lairs
and all the secrets creatures keep
[Ötzi]
When the hay wain wound its way across the hill
you failed to follow because winter meant
fallow meant cold frozen fields meant then lost
in the icy heights meant also found means found
five thousand three hundred years after they knapped
the blade and you made room for it in your body
winter means preservation means the soul
on ice means dead is only one definition means
geography is only one explanation
the seasons turn the season turns colder
the mirrors fog over when I breathe meaning
I can be visible be present but
not while yet I live and true north is nothing
but a lodestone just another sharp implement
pointing to lost those nearly endless years
the body retrieved from the ice rope marks
and scars still visible in the flesh
and pollen that necessary sturdy fruit
says head down in a glacier one blade
in your hand and one in place of your heart
says when first you were lost the blackthorn
was in flower as was the larch
[Coda]
And it came to pass after this that the chariots broke the hours
into horses broke them to the rein bit the hackamore the whip
it was already and still is as if nothing had ever happened and
the chariots were made of gold of air of geese barking across
the speckled sky the crows look up order in their dictionary
of branch and cloud and answers keep not happening for any
of us beside the river they closed the road so now we walk
and the river moves and moves on and does not and the cool
drumskin sky turns gray then grayer still and then the thunder
comes
[Wilt thou play with him as with a bird]
For I have loved the blade with all my crippled
with all my awkward soul loved it for the shine
sheen for the ease and grace of doing what it was
made to do for I have loved the stubborn womb
its beloved intent have loved the hope and then
learned to love the lack for I have loved the water
the way it comes to me comes for me in all its
liquid mystery for I have loved what the water
loves its myriad vessels sky basin runnel channel
and vein for all it claims and contains for I have
loved its muscular flex its rise coil and fall so like
Leviathan’s mighty desperate heart for I have loved
Leviathan for being only for being exactly
what god hated and what he made for being
water’s own knife this wild unholy blade
Right Panel
[When trees are dead they are]
When trees are dead they are wood straight-grained
solid flesh when we die we are of what use what matter
no shelter is built of our bones of our going such small pieces
taken instead into soil lair into ground wind sand salt or sea
the world barely remade in our unfastening these bodies
so ill-suited to use better suited to waste to want to hunger
the way our minds attach themselves with claw and teeth
to such thin things as hope to having met one man once again
and once again to having invented desire that terrible bludgeon
that blade so rare to desire the essential simple things
rice for the table blanket for the bed we want hands instead
we want whatever we meant by love the bodies’ tectonic
collision friction the frisson of touch subsumed subducted
in the plates the wine the meal we are all so practiced
at falling at coming slowly coming both apart and undone
skin by limb by falling we gather trees plant them deep
for love oh love marry me instead to the forest marry
me please to the fencepost the mast the table or the rack
[Carnation lily lily rose]
The trees drop wilting petals this confetti pink and red
lilac and rose as pollen too drifts and falls turns every
puddle urinous the drunken bees swerve through
the ruined afternoon and you keep asking me to believe
keep calling me an optimist but how can I count on this
count each happy family by their shuttered windows their
thoroughly locked doors how can I count smoke as evidence
of warmth of fire count on the way desire drunk on pollen
drunk on the season staggers and stings count on the way
strangers keep wanting to touch my hair make a wish you say
make a wish but the planets careen on through constellations
disrupting the given stories then changing them back again
black holes open and close like the beaks of baby birds
ravenous and crashing from their nests their naked skin
the cold pink of furled petals how is it that the world keeps
coming to this these long spring afternoons how can I count
them as evidence of anything oh love you think I wanted this
I never wanted this I didn’t know how to want any of this
[Sisyphus in love]
At first it was the stone the rough stubble skin of it the call
and response the stone’s going its perpetual coming back
the insistence of the fact of it shaping each piece of his body
muscle bone rough hands their slow curve toward its weight
the way it wanted the way it wanted him never farther away
than the length of his arm the cheek to cheek dance the way
he wore its dust and scent breathed it in and then it was the hill
the way he cut his name his story over time the furze worn
in tracks how it defined his being a tipped horizon the sky
obscured the way it wore each cloud the world’s difficult
weather as jewel and costume the myriad ways it refused
to move be moved seduced or yield he loved it most for that
and then it was the song those lovely small waves that flutter
felt against the ear his skin that it could also sometimes be
like this those pulsing waves such fine such slight adjustments
it took his breath tuned turned his ear to hear and overhear
those notes upon his shore his skin and then it was the stone again
[Eve]
If the angels came there would be no kindness they are
after all also without mercy pity they are warriors soldiers
of wing beak and sword they are griffins of the lord endlessly
taking sides come unto all of this world to do his bidding
he has no interest in rescue how obvious that has become he has
no interest in the seed its vanishing its chance random choice
of fate either ground cradled or ground down in the bird’s
churning belly seed is food is blood is muscle is waiting
to become flesh its own or someone else’s seed is always
fuel in the metabolic fire the apple a womb encounters
her teeth she taught herself to eat god taught her to bleed
[Stutter]
I said love because it came closest said leave
because you did we do this peeling off each
from each each from suddenly other said
come back but meant don’t go I said dead
and meant every one of those instances of
vanishment how the dead swim away from us
in time their tide their closed wooden boats
I said tide but tide was never right said tide
because we have no word for that kind of
unforgiving away I said tether when I meant
anchor when I meant stay but when I said stay
one thing I meant was against confusion
against yet another loss I meant two-faced
Janus January’s god of fallen gates of trying
to look both ways and when I said farewell
I meant again don’t go but it was too late I was
here in the hall this tunnel full of mirrors glass
and strange made-up faces and when I thought
funhouse I meant its opposite I meant this
rusty carnival town the men so sad they paint
their smiles in place they paint their faces
white paint their eyes wide and full of crying
[Sirens]
I’m not Penelope married to faith married to waiting
bound in fine soft strands of silk dyed and stretched
in my world longing has teeth and fins has a taste
for blood longing is a room built entirely of knives
all edges facing in all points afire and also somehow
held to the vessel in my world sirens are the town criers
saying something’s happened and maybe to you saying
someone got too close to danger sirens are the past tense
of rescue meaning clean-up in aisle three where
the glass racks have fallen before the mast where the sea
rose up between the meat and the waiting where the bed
refused as usual to become the boat where the dead
drape and tangle in the rigging the sheets in the loom
and the sirens gather to wail flicker and shine where they
gather together to sing of damage to sing us home
[Parable]
God the child threw fits threw storms like broken toys
around his room god the child rested slept as in that old joke
like a baby waking often to cry for who or what made and fed
bathed and kept him god the child was already older than any
thing he caused to be made he left his crib his prison of flesh
for other states god the child made and loves the master who
to save the nation clips the wings of ravens chains them into
the certainties of space and stone no more wingéd oars chewing
the sky the creak of flight made quiet made deafening by
its absence the way the stars make the dark into synaesthetic
noise god the child gathers the clipped feathers broken wings
sews them into cloak blanket story god the child kills
the ravenmaster in the fullness in the boredom of his days
and the black beaks open and silence is stolen into rasping
speech and this this is where love is born where love comes from
as the birds are chained to the tower so we are chained
to each other and god the child makes another ravenmaster
to love and maim the birds and god grows older grows
tired rests his sick head on piles and soft piles of broken
wings hoarse voices of our clipped and necessary feathers
[Charm for a spring storm]
I am tamping down the earth I am patting it back
with the flat side of a blade I am burying you
with all the other dead because hydrangeas because
lilacs and tiny cinquefoil stars and when you call
and when you say you want to meet and I say yes
but suddenly the snow prevents your arrival I simply
dig another hole though the ground is unwilling though
the ground is cold and indifferent and when you called
I was busy I was combing my hair there in the garden
I was inventorying the bones saying sacrum saying
iliac crest saying sternal notch I was watching I was waiting
for the moon for the moon to turn my hair even more
silver I never thought I’d get this old and now
nothing I own has ever smelled of you I was
in the garden and it was snowing and the whole world
was on fire it was spring and I was adding stones to
my pockets trying to teach the ground trying to teach
the water that this is how you love you don’t give up
you don’t give back you take the bones hold them tight
you cut a way in weigh the body down weigh down
the body with a body you fold the garden in around you
like a blanket like a prayer you come over here you stay
[Landscape with falling birds]
All the voices in the world humming in the radio waves in the wires
tangle braid and knot and not one is you trying to find me every one
is the dropped call lost before it sets tongue to bell pulse to pulse
they sing the voices in the wires in the wave
s in the sky I hear them
singing all the time operatic and frantic and I cannot sleep for all
the singing when I wake from not sleeping a hundred thousand birds
have fallen dead from the wires their branches if someone could gather
the dead the rain of feathers and flight would drown us all and
there would be no boat then the boat would come too late the captain
demanding a payment that payment would be stop trying to forget
remember all the time for ever the sound of his voice remember
as if it were the last light before you were blind and I would say
but wait what is a voice what is light they are uninhabitable
you cannot live there and he would say yes and he would say
remember as if it were the only perfect light so what I see is not
candle star sun incandescent neon acetylene moon no buzz hum
flicker heat is instead the scent of all that died mixed with time
and pressure poured into glass and fragile poured against a wick and lit
[That]
That this is the morning in which nothing much
that the sky is still there and the water dresses
accordingly that only at night does the water rest
vanish from sight that the stars are too small too far
to register there that all our names too are writ
invisibly on water that abiding requires more hope
than I can possibly acquire that hope is not a thing
with feathers that hope is a thing with a fist a thin
crust sketched over oceans that hope is what despair
uses for bait come in hope says the water’s fine
that hope is the blood with which you write letters
that start dear sea dear ocean stop asking so fucking
much that hope is a telegram delivered by men
in pairs men in uniform a telegram that says missing
stop that says once again presumed lost stop
[Venice]
It is spring will be soon and Venice is sinking
into its own ocean the past the places I may
The Book of Endings Page 2