While crickets tighten their solitary bolts
and morning’s still dark-tousled,
the steady fan, steady turbine of summer mist,
each engine, planet, floating spark,
each person roams a room in my heart,
mother snaps beans into a bowl, father
blows smoke out through the screen door
and my wife lifts her arm to look at her arm,
the amethyst-and-platinum bracelet in slats
of amber light, caught like a bee in sap.
After the afternoon hammock, beer bottles
loosening their labels with sweat, after
fireflies ignite like far city lights
that tease, devouring and devoured like stars
that fall, hampered with lust and weight,
I wait for her to come to bed, the water
in the pipes a kind of signal like locking
doors, turning the sheets and sleep
like a shell smoothed in the waves’ lathe
and the kiss cool with fatigue and mint.
Before the delicate downward yearning of snow,
the winter wools and wafts of cedar, naphtha
and dry winter heat, the opaque wrapping
done and undone, burning in the grate,
before the gray vaulted shape of each burned thing,
the bitter medicinal dust, old lace and its cobweb
dream breaking in my hand, each thread frays, knots
give and knot again like roots into stem,
the stem unraveling into flower, into flame,
into seed and wind, into dirt, into into into.