The dipper drinks the darkened broth.
A friend’s drunken silhouette has cut
Through the anonymity of the crowd.
The other stars like shade
And warping shadow on a scrim
Collect the minds of the disinterested
Whose smoke escapes the masquerade.
Not what we are, but that we’re not
Ourselves, achieves an evening of affect
And musky color palette: crimson, black.
“And does he wear a mask?”
The moon, our hostess, loves the wit
While her husband twirls his mustache as if
Its being real could counteract.
A feather in a knot of hair
Funnels attention from a low-backed dress.
As a mask activates when worn or egress
Transforms a set of stairs
The mind requires this pinion there
Or interest dissolves in atmosphere;
In plumage, one plume despairs.
Narcissus Unless Echo by Jake Fournier
I am drawn to that clear stream
stretching thataway.
I submerge my face in it
with open eyes—
What are these translucent fish
that flagellate against the current?
I am afraid, but not of time.
I am alone temporarily—
pistols, skiffs, the propane heater
in the hunting shack
where I spine-shot a doe
and her front legs flailed,
dragging her second-half
like a roller-suitcase
through the cattails.
I blotted her hound-like ear
a second time, and, when I
lowered the white-bead,
it still wasn’t there. Where
Mennonites are chasing
golf balls beyond the trees,
this is the song they sing:
We see the sisters’ caps above the weeds,
eleven seasons’ strange variety.
The smith forgives the lorgnette’s sting
and silence plates the jewelry.
What am I thinking?
A man slit from the larynx,
half his ribcage over
each flank, his arms
hanging stirrup-like.
Of this time I was on a horse
at the Crawford Fair and the horse
got on its knees.
Danger—
I felt nothing when I read
the sign. I wanted to swim
by the dam there and I did
and nothing came of it.
stretching thataway.
I submerge my face in it
with open eyes—
What are these translucent fish
that flagellate against the current?
I am afraid, but not of time.
I am alone temporarily—
pistols, skiffs, the propane heater
in the hunting shack
where I spine-shot a doe
and her front legs flailed,
dragging her second-half
like a roller-suitcase
through the cattails.
I blotted her hound-like ear
a second time, and, when I
lowered the white-bead,
it still wasn’t there. Where
Mennonites are chasing
golf balls beyond the trees,
this is the song they sing:
We see the sisters’ caps above the weeds,
eleven seasons’ strange variety.
The smith forgives the lorgnette’s sting
and silence plates the jewelry.
What am I thinking?
A man slit from the larynx,
half his ribcage over
each flank, his arms
hanging stirrup-like.
Of this time I was on a horse
at the Crawford Fair and the horse
got on its knees.
Danger—
I felt nothing when I read
the sign. I wanted to swim
by the dam there and I did
and nothing came of it.
Aspects of Flights by Jake Fournier
We are more or less the difference between us, I kneel.
You look down on me, unknowingly,
one of many congregating in the midnight gorges
and zinc jags streaming beneath you and the blonde
Lufthansa girl dispensing juices. She drifts through
the isle, stenciling
her pillbox hat onto your fondest memories before you turn away
again, wanting more. The earth below is otherworldly;
Alps smack the eye.
Literally outdoors, the room is addressing
a triangular
horse when you arrive, “Though it might seem hopeless
to find a comfortable arrangement between your banal
pursuits, Zodiacal warnings, Gemütlichkeit, and self-regard
we see nature
sometimes provides a solution in strato-cumulo patterning
on the white sky.” It directs as best it can a speedy
removal of these
life-size props, grinding the horizon into time. Somewhere
in the treeless wastes, another airplane’s shadow skips—we’re
in it. Starlight dives splashless into daytime.
Filled with the sands of the Rub al Khali,
my Onasakus dimple the desert floor. It whips a dune
buggy hood with
sheets while Ud drones from the open passenger
door. Through its window, you see al Liwa’s coign
advancing. You
hike your abaya and book to the truth, Khulood. Your lips—Allure Laque in Dragon
smearing stoplight like a river—purse. The desert
makes flats of your pumps. You want to drive, you say. O come on,
Jake, 180
kilometers ocean, degrees vision. It’s this kind
of material thinking thought,
balking to be acted, triggering regret, insists.
You stoke the fantasy by doing nothing. Headlong the awkward
seeking you meant to avoid, dowels,
tape, old grocery
bag, fishing wire—cut a diamond shape and cross the dowels between
the cardinal directions—good. Now, with the wind in your face, increase
the undertow velocity by kicking your legs violently out, left, right,
etc., shooting
the date trees back in that time
you spent—was it running? This tugging at your hands is
a simulation of the resistance meeting the deep-sea
submersible’s robotic claws. Boring into the dark entrance
in the cruise ship’s plated hall, the spotlight beams are stiff
as sheet metal. You exhale. The dust you see is embedded
8 inches in the glass.
You look down on me, unknowingly,
one of many congregating in the midnight gorges
and zinc jags streaming beneath you and the blonde
Lufthansa girl dispensing juices. She drifts through
the isle, stenciling
her pillbox hat onto your fondest memories before you turn away
again, wanting more. The earth below is otherworldly;
Alps smack the eye.
Literally outdoors, the room is addressing
a triangular
horse when you arrive, “Though it might seem hopeless
to find a comfortable arrangement between your banal
pursuits, Zodiacal warnings, Gemütlichkeit, and self-regard
we see nature
sometimes provides a solution in strato-cumulo patterning
on the white sky.” It directs as best it can a speedy
removal of these
life-size props, grinding the horizon into time. Somewhere
in the treeless wastes, another airplane’s shadow skips—we’re
in it. Starlight dives splashless into daytime.
Filled with the sands of the Rub al Khali,
my Onasakus dimple the desert floor. It whips a dune
buggy hood with
sheets while Ud drones from the open passenger
door. Through its window, you see al Liwa’s coign
advancing. You
hike your abaya and book to the truth, Khulood. Your lips—Allure Laque in Dragon
smearing stoplight like a river—purse. The desert
makes flats of your pumps. You want to drive, you say. O come on,
Jake, 180
kilometers ocean, degrees vision. It’s this kind
of material thinking thought,
balking to be acted, triggering regret, insists.
You stoke the fantasy by doing nothing. Headlong the awkward
seeking you meant to avoid, dowels,
tape, old grocery
bag, fishing wire—cut a diamond shape and cross the dowels between
the cardinal directions—good. Now, with the wind in your face, increase
the undertow velocity by kicking your legs violently out, left, right,
etc., shooting
the date trees back in that time
you spent—was it running? This tugging at your hands is
a simulation of the resistance meeting the deep-sea
submersible’s robotic claws. Boring into the dark entrance
in the cruise ship’s plated hall, the spotlight beams are stiff
as sheet metal. You exhale. The dust you see is embedded
8 inches in the glass.
A Hoof for the Vagabond by Jake Fournier
Something about the gun was off, we grew up
thinking and promised that much and that aimlessness to ruin
a sitting room, sans divan or stool, that’s something
like the great outdoors with hedges
creasing the yards
fielding a tree between whose elbows something ripens like a question.
Time hadn’t passed, just some was missing,
not that that prevented me when driving down
from seeing freshly how little I could at night.
The houses and shrubs were drywall for wallpaper darkness.
The darkness concealed denser foliage,
the long hemlock needles
massaging pinecones into obscurity—things I’d seen already
in a dress rehearsal for the present.
And the meaning to tell you, as I meant to say
goes beyond what’s said
to teach that density and that freedom to mean
our leaving’s what the trees have seen to,
themselves and tomorrow. Even emptiness
has a backdrop, which, though you expected everything,
is spare.
You came down, woke up over an hour,
said this should have happened before
as it has to other people,
people who hold you awkwardly sometimes and who, others, stand away
thinking how you’ll fail
those whom nameless lackings made want you
and those, telling time by what flowers are still living—
now irises, now violets—whom you take inside,
and whose velleities, unknown to themselves,
appear to gather into a wall,
an apparent willingness shaped inside a cloud.
Cross country,
men are ballooning over yellower,
more dilapidated Pennsylvanias. I’d find it alien
if it weren’t that my father used to sponsor one
(Fournier Construction). We were chasers once—
With camouflage
binoculars pressed to the windshield,
we pursued ours like a memory past its purpose
to the farmhouse where it bent to stripe the field.
“The Devil’s Horse!”
the farmers joked. Alfalfa and rye
in the silos, the farm had invited its neighbors and, when we got there, us
to sweetcorn. The waxier, yellow-white strains—
Sugar & Gold, Double Standard—
were through. They were on to Country Gentleman
and Argent. (Thinking about it, I feel butter
on my chin.) Of course we knew each other then,
but we were my family in this stanza,
Phil. I hope it’s clear by now I want this to change
you, that there are reasons, looks, touches
you apply to patience thinning the life in every gesture
you make, and though each seems it’s being made then, before whomever, original,
you bear them like departures; if they give
you an innocent air—an opal if—
you are a die—uncertain until the instant shows
you natural tendencies not overmastered by
the advantages of contempt for doing without.
The afternoon is over Gospel Hill watching the sun into Canada.
My shadow abandons its stilts at the edge of a barn.
It’s been converted since—
I’m sure this time it will be easy.
The latest leavings, the drones who needled from the wainscot in March,
returned eager for the weather to begin.
We follow then,
exploiting loopholes, listening.
thinking and promised that much and that aimlessness to ruin
a sitting room, sans divan or stool, that’s something
like the great outdoors with hedges
creasing the yards
fielding a tree between whose elbows something ripens like a question.
Time hadn’t passed, just some was missing,
not that that prevented me when driving down
from seeing freshly how little I could at night.
The houses and shrubs were drywall for wallpaper darkness.
The darkness concealed denser foliage,
the long hemlock needles
massaging pinecones into obscurity—things I’d seen already
in a dress rehearsal for the present.
And the meaning to tell you, as I meant to say
goes beyond what’s said
to teach that density and that freedom to mean
our leaving’s what the trees have seen to,
themselves and tomorrow. Even emptiness
has a backdrop, which, though you expected everything,
is spare.
You came down, woke up over an hour,
said this should have happened before
as it has to other people,
people who hold you awkwardly sometimes and who, others, stand away
thinking how you’ll fail
those whom nameless lackings made want you
and those, telling time by what flowers are still living—
now irises, now violets—whom you take inside,
and whose velleities, unknown to themselves,
appear to gather into a wall,
an apparent willingness shaped inside a cloud.
Cross country,
men are ballooning over yellower,
more dilapidated Pennsylvanias. I’d find it alien
if it weren’t that my father used to sponsor one
(Fournier Construction). We were chasers once—
With camouflage
binoculars pressed to the windshield,
we pursued ours like a memory past its purpose
to the farmhouse where it bent to stripe the field.
“The Devil’s Horse!”
the farmers joked. Alfalfa and rye
in the silos, the farm had invited its neighbors and, when we got there, us
to sweetcorn. The waxier, yellow-white strains—
Sugar & Gold, Double Standard—
were through. They were on to Country Gentleman
and Argent. (Thinking about it, I feel butter
on my chin.) Of course we knew each other then,
but we were my family in this stanza,
Phil. I hope it’s clear by now I want this to change
you, that there are reasons, looks, touches
you apply to patience thinning the life in every gesture
you make, and though each seems it’s being made then, before whomever, original,
you bear them like departures; if they give
you an innocent air—an opal if—
you are a die—uncertain until the instant shows
you natural tendencies not overmastered by
the advantages of contempt for doing without.
The afternoon is over Gospel Hill watching the sun into Canada.
My shadow abandons its stilts at the edge of a barn.
It’s been converted since—
I’m sure this time it will be easy.
The latest leavings, the drones who needled from the wainscot in March,
returned eager for the weather to begin.
We follow then,
exploiting loopholes, listening.
Foray by Nikki-Lee Birdsey
We fixed the dimensions, slowing the
understanding : you’ll see it yet
the yesterday within this day within
tomorrow wherein we predict the
future by inventing it.
I spent the most barmy parcel
of a day in clear rural thinking.
The perfectly white gazebo against
the edge of the lake, shining,
flaked grey painted floorboards and
my foot, grubby and flecked with cut grass
from walking the gradient slope, strikes as
the only childlike aspect of my body.
While pushing silvered lily pads
underwater lightly, I rise and walk up
again to the white house, the small pops
of fish still feeding at the surface fade.
An American relation asks me what
I do down there and how do I like my
steak these days. On the white verandah
the floorboards hard and warm, I look out
at the tall trees behind the lake in the
gentle distance, the fire tower blinks or
flashes sharp silver periodically amidst
the background of dark green valleys
and mountains. In oil country it’s all rough,
she says, for transplants, but this land
is ours. The high school wrestling team
with baby-faces but built-up bodies bale
hay and stuff the barn in late afternoon,
the yellow glow inside, dark particles floating
around the thick activity and sweat before
they lose the light.
I watch the cows approach and
recede episodically between
chews of dandelion, grass, and
between those chews short
bouts of frolicking. I feel good
contemplating the harvest; neosporin
on my forearms where the hay scratched
while helping the hot teenagers who
scared me with dead snakes found
in tractor wheels.
I. This the benevolent Eastern.
At night, far away, I dream
the fresh sensation of that lake water—
somnambulist sweats in dark terrors
in this mid-place, the driest place on earth.
The black crows already started,
their paint-thin wings peeling off
with croaked cries emitted from
large predatory bodies. They need
no camouflage at night unlike eastern
screech owls with downy, flat faces.
I am standing in this land, bare, pale,
watching them plural in sky’s explosion.
At the mall on a Saturday you explain
the new kind of hunting camouflage
at Scheel’s that mimics what certain
animals see, like deer, who see
only yellows, greys, blues.
Think how they think, it must always
be dusk with those hues. I give you
everything out of order.
Waking, I remember the sensation
of fear as when I stole Honecker’s
red cushion from the Stasi museum
in east Berlin, walking coolly
out of the preserved headquarters
then running through empty eastern
streets as if in the cold war or worse.
Later, a boyfriend laughs and I’ve somehow
shipped myself all the way to the Odeon,
having dinner with him and telling the
terror while he opens different wines
and smokes and adjusts his cufflinks
telling me to put on a different dress
while I stare owl-faced in the mirror.
I say. He laughs again,
his hand round my large face.
II. That was a good spring in Paris.
The autumn kingdom gives way to
deeper autumn, the presentation of change
more rapid and varied, but by now
we already know what that looks like
so. I’ve spent the past few months
exploring pathologies of certain
fears traced in various forms.
This sullied fruit, you say, you are
beating the horse out of this moment,
the small life extracted from static events—
Nikkileeopathy is chronic, fearful for
where this is coming to.
Mood architecture has all the same scars
and it starts with the terrible insomnia
that began in New York City,
the evening, september sixth.
Thinking back I could fall
asleep only on my building’s
sloped rooftop in Bushwick,
which was presently immersed
in yellow artificial light
but atmospheric because it was
accidental in my situation,
the city breathing and connecting
in tunnels under water and
above water, cubed anonymity
so that even the inanimate things
don’t care how to sleep. The city
gives and takes in benevolent
abundance. I look out at a perfectly
capturable Manhattan behind
the East river, only 4 stories high,
a few slim stems of buildings against
nebulous island plot, orange furrows
hazing into general night colour; all the while
a low humming of the metropolis cradled
and I in loose isolation up there,
surrounded by slight industrial quiet
in total divergence with light saturation.
I slept well, the edge of the building
a bottom line, the pre-war stone cherubs
looking out at the same.
III. Here the reversal of polarity.
Reverse the polarity. It’s Fall,
and everything’s aflame, the rapid
consumption of carbon the new
nature which we absorb in our
own bodies’ toxicity and when
we die everybody benefits.
Un-lie me landscape, late bloom,
from then on everyone is watching.
The life so unpopulated with people
generally so the night contains
the millions watching; the lank,
lean faces in windows. Now absent
the sky trees and controlling fluency
of Tasman waters, the particular
blue slanting into dark sands
is just a pathology to fill spaces
in memory and in presence with it
all existing atop something else,
can you locate this. The father visceral,
the mother visceral.
I look for them while we clear
ginger plants, not literally look, because
they’re dead, but I think of them
contained in the tasks they did.
The ginger bright orange, red,
swilled with yellow, clearing it away
because it’s a weed and a danger
to indigenous plants, and we,
as children, walked the many
paths pushed available, paths through
sands, paths scaling cliffs,
paths through the bush, which was dense
and untracked so to be a danger but
nobody cared because nobody died
except when we grew older.
The peach teenager body flapping
then slack off concave cliff covered
in round bulbous rocks, all manner
of greys, the only blood discernible
was imagined—
was the jagged scratches of blood from
the yellow and green gorse his feet trampled
upon lift off, another anglo-weed, impostor,
cleared away as if agreed.
The last wanted jump and the held vigil
with fluff of dune plants shallow in cliff soil,
his body away in the sea so alternately
ferocious. We played chicken
with the tide through rock formations;
we were never alternately indigenous
or precious, but we mourned the corruption
of such a body never found.
Just us sitting in the family’s kitchen,
hundreds of dried, faded bunched
flowers hanging from the rafted ceiling,
it was airy and beautiful there
cut into the valley, poised against
glimpses of mountain the blank
space of the unrecovered,
the unsentimental motion of tide.
IV. You weep at the farewell to hemisphere.
The gerber daisy in red bottled water
from a spring in Wales on the desk,
a specific northern country, cold,
where I sent and received letters,
looking for ancestral connection;
something in the mausoleum
and folklore about burning the
family relics that is pagan, so say people.
The standard motions of moving
across dirt path to post box, the stamp,
sealed, contained, the homecoming
every special lead to grey-morphed dawn.
This mist pretends on the moor
the window no longer a window
the house no longer full of rooms
the town no longer begins at the gate.
The mist descends on the moor
this is concerted blankness in ancient
heath, but not empty, purple tufts in
dispersed hillocks of grand unfolding,
not a blankness but an openness where
low stone fences delineate archaic borders,
outcrops of rock against the green
that refocuses into misled dusk, to be
constantly asleep for the day
and awake for the turning on
night. I receive letters from siblings
spawned all over the colonies.
At this point, we are at the point
of no return, what is the difference
between honesty of the heart
and resisting the act of lying.
Little house structured easily in clear cut wood
the cream whitewash and deep grey slab,
the day bringing my thoughts to burning stones,
you took me, and we left.
V. Gone is the last name of family.
Wake up to think early under new
environs, where objects get
unexpectedly soft, malleable endpoints
to alloyed material, pewter and streaked
granite that glistens in place the formation
of quartered measurements or section
through bed on room floor next to end table
which has a lamp with naked bright bulb
but placid, gentle. It shines on the
distinctive properties of space that
becomes shaded or uncovered into new
beings in fascinating sequence. An opal ring
sparkles into view at 4 in the afternoon.
I remember what characterizes the colour
of opals are the absences;
the incandescence assists your colour
in grey no blue light no it’s
slow motion, the associations in
untypical pathways, pushing yourself
to lesser limits, the box elder bug noticed
crawling up the corner crease of the room,
the patterned black shell a moving spot,
a shuffling hole, a deliberate imperfection
attracted to heat that comes from the lofted
vents breathing in flux like a big city
where we lie, marked for life, ready,
the white sheets arranging almost imperceptibly
around the slow pulse, the rise falling of your body.
I just so can’t wait for the night to be done,
moving into another room like a new experience;
the Persian rug patterned as ally, connecting
to all the different objects in bonds loosed and reformed
in a quiet piece, and with all
the old radiators on multiple species
of plant wilt in the caged heat.
Look out the window, the air grey and
the front yard covered with red leaves
similarly wilted and ossifying to leaf
skeletons like tiny crushed skulls like
bad dreams or rough-sketched auguries.
We made it moving in the movement of early dawn,
the plunge and pouring out of evening black and
the gradual receding of space in reverse dimmer.
There are enough moments we are collecting and releasing
in strong sequence.
The night brings you further away from me,
but the morning draws you close.
VI. Look, how we stalled the dimensions.
understanding : you’ll see it yet
the yesterday within this day within
tomorrow wherein we predict the
future by inventing it.
I spent the most barmy parcel
of a day in clear rural thinking.
The perfectly white gazebo against
the edge of the lake, shining,
flaked grey painted floorboards and
my foot, grubby and flecked with cut grass
from walking the gradient slope, strikes as
the only childlike aspect of my body.
While pushing silvered lily pads
underwater lightly, I rise and walk up
again to the white house, the small pops
of fish still feeding at the surface fade.
An American relation asks me what
I do down there and how do I like my
steak these days. On the white verandah
the floorboards hard and warm, I look out
at the tall trees behind the lake in the
gentle distance, the fire tower blinks or
flashes sharp silver periodically amidst
the background of dark green valleys
and mountains. In oil country it’s all rough,
she says, for transplants, but this land
is ours. The high school wrestling team
with baby-faces but built-up bodies bale
hay and stuff the barn in late afternoon,
the yellow glow inside, dark particles floating
around the thick activity and sweat before
they lose the light.
I watch the cows approach and
recede episodically between
chews of dandelion, grass, and
between those chews short
bouts of frolicking. I feel good
contemplating the harvest; neosporin
on my forearms where the hay scratched
while helping the hot teenagers who
scared me with dead snakes found
in tractor wheels.
I. This the benevolent Eastern.
At night, far away, I dream
the fresh sensation of that lake water—
somnambulist sweats in dark terrors
in this mid-place, the driest place on earth.
The black crows already started,
their paint-thin wings peeling off
with croaked cries emitted from
large predatory bodies. They need
no camouflage at night unlike eastern
screech owls with downy, flat faces.
I am standing in this land, bare, pale,
watching them plural in sky’s explosion.
At the mall on a Saturday you explain
the new kind of hunting camouflage
at Scheel’s that mimics what certain
animals see, like deer, who see
only yellows, greys, blues.
Think how they think, it must always
be dusk with those hues. I give you
everything out of order.
Waking, I remember the sensation
of fear as when I stole Honecker’s
red cushion from the Stasi museum
in east Berlin, walking coolly
out of the preserved headquarters
then running through empty eastern
streets as if in the cold war or worse.
Later, a boyfriend laughs and I’ve somehow
shipped myself all the way to the Odeon,
having dinner with him and telling the
terror while he opens different wines
and smokes and adjusts his cufflinks
telling me to put on a different dress
while I stare owl-faced in the mirror.
I say. He laughs again,
his hand round my large face.
II. That was a good spring in Paris.
The autumn kingdom gives way to
deeper autumn, the presentation of change
more rapid and varied, but by now
we already know what that looks like
so. I’ve spent the past few months
exploring pathologies of certain
fears traced in various forms.
This sullied fruit, you say, you are
beating the horse out of this moment,
the small life extracted from static events—
Nikkileeopathy is chronic, fearful for
where this is coming to.
Mood architecture has all the same scars
and it starts with the terrible insomnia
that began in New York City,
the evening, september sixth.
Thinking back I could fall
asleep only on my building’s
sloped rooftop in Bushwick,
which was presently immersed
in yellow artificial light
but atmospheric because it was
accidental in my situation,
the city breathing and connecting
in tunnels under water and
above water, cubed anonymity
so that even the inanimate things
don’t care how to sleep. The city
gives and takes in benevolent
abundance. I look out at a perfectly
capturable Manhattan behind
the East river, only 4 stories high,
a few slim stems of buildings against
nebulous island plot, orange furrows
hazing into general night colour; all the while
a low humming of the metropolis cradled
and I in loose isolation up there,
surrounded by slight industrial quiet
in total divergence with light saturation.
I slept well, the edge of the building
a bottom line, the pre-war stone cherubs
looking out at the same.
III. Here the reversal of polarity.
Reverse the polarity. It’s Fall,
and everything’s aflame, the rapid
consumption of carbon the new
nature which we absorb in our
own bodies’ toxicity and when
we die everybody benefits.
Un-lie me landscape, late bloom,
from then on everyone is watching.
The life so unpopulated with people
generally so the night contains
the millions watching; the lank,
lean faces in windows. Now absent
the sky trees and controlling fluency
of Tasman waters, the particular
blue slanting into dark sands
is just a pathology to fill spaces
in memory and in presence with it
all existing atop something else,
can you locate this. The father visceral,
the mother visceral.
I look for them while we clear
ginger plants, not literally look, because
they’re dead, but I think of them
contained in the tasks they did.
The ginger bright orange, red,
swilled with yellow, clearing it away
because it’s a weed and a danger
to indigenous plants, and we,
as children, walked the many
paths pushed available, paths through
sands, paths scaling cliffs,
paths through the bush, which was dense
and untracked so to be a danger but
nobody cared because nobody died
except when we grew older.
The peach teenager body flapping
then slack off concave cliff covered
in round bulbous rocks, all manner
of greys, the only blood discernible
was imagined—
was the jagged scratches of blood from
the yellow and green gorse his feet trampled
upon lift off, another anglo-weed, impostor,
cleared away as if agreed.
The last wanted jump and the held vigil
with fluff of dune plants shallow in cliff soil,
his body away in the sea so alternately
ferocious. We played chicken
with the tide through rock formations;
we were never alternately indigenous
or precious, but we mourned the corruption
of such a body never found.
Just us sitting in the family’s kitchen,
hundreds of dried, faded bunched
flowers hanging from the rafted ceiling,
it was airy and beautiful there
cut into the valley, poised against
glimpses of mountain the blank
space of the unrecovered,
the unsentimental motion of tide.
IV. You weep at the farewell to hemisphere.
The gerber daisy in red bottled water
from a spring in Wales on the desk,
a specific northern country, cold,
where I sent and received letters,
looking for ancestral connection;
something in the mausoleum
and folklore about burning the
family relics that is pagan, so say people.
The standard motions of moving
across dirt path to post box, the stamp,
sealed, contained, the homecoming
every special lead to grey-morphed dawn.
This mist pretends on the moor
the window no longer a window
the house no longer full of rooms
the town no longer begins at the gate.
The mist descends on the moor
this is concerted blankness in ancient
heath, but not empty, purple tufts in
dispersed hillocks of grand unfolding,
not a blankness but an openness where
low stone fences delineate archaic borders,
outcrops of rock against the green
that refocuses into misled dusk, to be
constantly asleep for the day
and awake for the turning on
night. I receive letters from siblings
spawned all over the colonies.
At this point, we are at the point
of no return, what is the difference
between honesty of the heart
and resisting the act of lying.
Little house structured easily in clear cut wood
the cream whitewash and deep grey slab,
the day bringing my thoughts to burning stones,
you took me, and we left.
V. Gone is the last name of family.
Wake up to think early under new
environs, where objects get
unexpectedly soft, malleable endpoints
to alloyed material, pewter and streaked
granite that glistens in place the formation
of quartered measurements or section
through bed on room floor next to end table
which has a lamp with naked bright bulb
but placid, gentle. It shines on the
distinctive properties of space that
becomes shaded or uncovered into new
beings in fascinating sequence. An opal ring
sparkles into view at 4 in the afternoon.
I remember what characterizes the colour
of opals are the absences;
the incandescence assists your colour
in grey no blue light no it’s
slow motion, the associations in
untypical pathways, pushing yourself
to lesser limits, the box elder bug noticed
crawling up the corner crease of the room,
the patterned black shell a moving spot,
a shuffling hole, a deliberate imperfection
attracted to heat that comes from the lofted
vents breathing in flux like a big city
where we lie, marked for life, ready,
the white sheets arranging almost imperceptibly
around the slow pulse, the rise falling of your body.
I just so can’t wait for the night to be done,
moving into another room like a new experience;
the Persian rug patterned as ally, connecting
to all the different objects in bonds loosed and reformed
in a quiet piece, and with all
the old radiators on multiple species
of plant wilt in the caged heat.
Look out the window, the air grey and
the front yard covered with red leaves
similarly wilted and ossifying to leaf
skeletons like tiny crushed skulls like
bad dreams or rough-sketched auguries.
We made it moving in the movement of early dawn,
the plunge and pouring out of evening black and
the gradual receding of space in reverse dimmer.
There are enough moments we are collecting and releasing
in strong sequence.
The night brings you further away from me,
but the morning draws you close.
VI. Look, how we stalled the dimensions.