1.
This morning I awoke with a fresh sense
of total, desperate hell
Our failure to love each other well
O let a jesus come down and make it sweet
Let a jesus take an axe to the wheel
Part the fire with tongs
2. (How not to fall)
You close your eyes and say waves
Yes, everything happens now in waves
I wanted to pull an okayness over me
so I lied about longing
Lied in the morning, then lied
in the evening
Then dropped the smallest granules into
a glass capsule, just trying to stay close
to the slope’s soil
Auroras are not definite until they happen
In fact the cards are always stacked against a good aurora
The sweet word hasn’t worn off
It’s just worn
Stop shaking the wound
If you want to see something glorious
Look at the Pleiades
4. (Something bright)
We share a brightness
It’s called death
in life
I toss and turn all night, hearing you say
I want to touch you
without using my hands
Then wake up with an offer:
The hype of my clarity
My good clench and ache
Every morning the shadow of my hand haunts
this table, asking, Can I bleed
here, can I become free here
Don’t want to be free
want to be with you, says the monster
But he is literally
a monster. And I seek
a different life, one
of constant rapture
though I know the shadow will soon return
with new questions, like
Is this theater?
6. (The Cinema)
And I beat myself
here, hoisted myself
onto this cliff
Blindfolded girl
in a party dress
poised at the edge
Ready to slake
the village appetite
for sacrifice
O begin again, begin
again.
After reading about a girl who was killed
by a knife-wound straight through to
a ventricle of her heart, I took a walk
in the rural cemetery. There I saw
two dead birds: one a scrawny baby; the other
fat, gray-feathered. Both equally dead, though
one was ringed with ants, the other
fresher. At the end of the path lay
a field, home to a regal, light-brown mare
and her foal. It was there
that I said a prayer
to the brown and blue notebooks
of your arms.