I love the stampede of broken glass,
there’s nothing quieter.
I press a scarlet seed into your palm.
Quiet.
It used to be enough to lie in my cradle
letting the planets burst from my forehead
and god would be on the telephone.
Hardly a scar now.
Motorcycles in the middle of the night
think they’re winning the argument
just by putting a big tear in the thesis.
But rage is quiet.
A shadow tied up in viscera is quiet.
Let us be clear about how little time is left,
what the avalanche requires of us.
Being drawn into the mouth of some eight-legged thing is quiet.
The center of the sun is quiet.
The last year of my friends’ marriage,
although one of them didn’t know it,
they’d get to the restaurant
and both start talking
so you’d have to choose
who to listen to, which quiet,
the one like a bottle of freesias
in an office full of broken chairs
or the one like the wind coming off the river
hard enough to freeze the tears it causes
same as now.
The paws of our great source
touch us in our sleep.