for Mark and Paul
1
When the mind walks without language,
there is no boardwalk; there is no Board;
there is no boredom; and there are no feet,
legs or yards, coin or meter. No measure,
no miles. What is freedom if not freedom
from distance? From speaking lines?
2
The leaves, little green lamps for the sunblind.
3
Blue fingertips. Could mean a beach-party
manicure or a corpse. Or: and a corpse.
To be touched intimately by blue fingertips.
To put it more bluntly: to be fingered
by the pool in which you drown.
4
Why not sparkle if given a choice and you’ve
had enough sleep? Why not give back
a tiny grain of what you’ve been given from
night’s endlessness and guaranteed breathing?
I have fractured only so minute a corner
of the deadest, most useless bone in the sky’s
body, how can I not make a kite of it?
How can I keep even the broken glass
to myself, drinking nothing out of nothing?
5
To swim is to let god know you won’t take it
lying down nor will you just lie down and take it.
6
Solemn toes respond directly even to the most
frivolous mind. What other rules but bent
rules? Can I love you from the other
side of the conversation? From the other side
of the brown-feathered space of the table?
Of the living, eaten egg and sunrise and sleep-
eyes wet from night?
7
The tiny grain of sand in the eye. The single
flap that lands the bird into the lonely next,
the only nest in the sea. The glimmer that
proves contact has been made. Dear child,
wild sea, closed eye. Far, loving air.
8
Walking in the sand—am I under the sun
or dangling over it, first by one foot
and then the other?
This cerulean weather and its yellow talons.
The afternoon on the brink of drink. My ears
are plugged with wax and seawater, utterly
corked. The light has to widen to include
the music I can’t hear. I am hoping the god
of catastrophe—barbecue, lightning, riptide—
has smarter fish to fry. Suddenly the scruffy
deer appears, as it often does in poems, a dark-
eyed child dreaming in a dream.
10
Where oh where is that one leaf?