Living as if every moment announced a beloved
and it does
Then the bleeding-off
Maybe you are the sea to me, or me to you
A reasonable enough supposition
Can’t you see, I’m busy
triangulating
Gingko leaves at my feet
A flood of questing yellow
They say that everything that is growing
will stop growing soon, maybe
this weekend, the first deep freeze
The season of falling
will give way to the season
of brittle upturned sticks
Who cares, it’s all equally gorgeous
and last night, a lunar eclipse
Immaculate white moving in and out
of a rusty red rind, I pulled
a sheet of Plexiglas over
the hole in the roof
so I could watch it from inside the boat
The boat from which we ride the sky
Nothing can go wrong, do you understand
Nothing can ever go wrong
This is what happens when you cease
your management
The blue and gold of the morning
just appear on the sidewalk, ongoing drift
of garbage, a tire is good to sit in
A window pane may flake in the wind
The mute story of November
I don’t even have to steal
your words, you give them to me for free
So strange to know that you can and cannot hurt me
My heart just can’t break any more, now that
it has changed substance, is full
of fluid and fire and air and turning
like a little wheel in its broth
And I can and cannot hurt you either, now that
I am utterly virginal, preposterous
as that may sound, it’s also true
Sometimes you get to start anew
The pages of my book wet and limpid
with tea, on a Sunday, the spidery plants
reaching haphazardly in all directions
from their dilapidated mobile, it’s part
of the magic here, and the painted green
cement floor. What part of this autonomy
am I not supposed to like?; I too have been
much lonelier. Maybe in eleven rooms
you’ll find some sort of home, or base, it’s like
there’s this enormous surplus of feelings and/or words
and we prick at the tarp, letting little pinwheels of light come in
but never really touching the source
So little time, really, we’ve eaten some food, slept badly
swam in jumbled waters, very little coming
I don’t even know you, shadowed by the knowing
The knowing that has nothing to do
with life-stories, their wicked specificity
Sometimes my speech moves so fast inside me
before it hatches, and I know I’m about to flop over
into tongues, but I don’t care: this is the speed
at which I run, and you run fast, too, so I let you
touch me with one hand while the other steers a car
through midtown Manhattan, it’s almost as if
none of this has ever happened, it just shines
then gets enclosed in an envelope decorated with faded blue stamps
from the Belgian Congo. It’s such a relief
when tears come from the cold, like yesterday
on River Street, all the men lined up in their idling cars
by the power plant, what are they waiting for?
With all due humility, I have to say
I know it now, or it knows me
the peace-feeling
that stays even as the body races and pants
above or along it, when the team suddenly does
a jazz square in unison, when a dream repeals
an impediment overnight, when the whole world
The whole world is strobing