Basin

It was fallen in

Not cavernous
or hollow

Nothing had eroded
It was there
It remained
just below
where it had been

There
low slung
prolapsed
Deeper
than an indentation

A tragedy
surrounding it
The history of the thing
stretching back
sinuous
to the level surface
Still traceable
It had not merely
dropped

It was fallen in

A collapse
without rubble
or trapped men
Though undeniably
a point of impact

We Sleep Beneath Birds

I didn’t catch your name.
Still,
here I am,
wondering what the point is;

In this perfection
we grow like fingernails
Will we ever stop?
No.
We might be cut or nibble-bitten
or ground down by work.
Yet we become and become
Until we die
and then maybe
we become something else,
then, some more.
I’d buy that book.
Has it been written?
The one that tells us what happens
when we stop becoming.
Some of us think we have
already.
Yes, like death
Truth.
If you find it I will lay with you
and let you scratch my back
with your fingernails,
while I search for it.
Yes
it is an invisible word,
there, not here.
So tonight, without names
We will sleep beneath birds.
Unlike umbrellas, our heads
above our bodies
swallowing glittering tears
before pride’s useless withered hand.
In the face of this
pinnacle of pleasing angles
obscuring our view
of details not meaningless.
As none we are.
As we are.
Hand-tinted as stars met
by ladders that end
twenty feet above the ground.
Your name is a script, illiterate.
On a delta of my hand’s palms
let me gift you
my resistance,
yes,
so we meet.

On Poetry and Papercuts (for Joe)

Protruding through the hoop-
A well turned ankle
steady and straight legged
Extending from beneath
a crenulated paper dress
of immortality

too thin to mourn
the tree it came from

Semi-precious emblem
corroborating a sacred
tongue’s aftertaste

An aural snag-
The version
held in talons

Utterance exquisitely rolled
wince meet within this
settled acceptance of
man-handled nourishment

Of charitable digressions
from the sunken eyes
deep within
your written inklings

Ghostling

Deceptively simple
the old photo you sent
of that windblown girl

Some jagged arrangement
of cheekbones and arms

Jutting out of nine hole boots
a little comedy of red knees
pulled in close as kittens
to hide a budding chest

The shapes you gave
those grey shadows
The rash of textures
that was a makeshift bed

There again she is
cocooned in her only clothes

The pretty ghostling
whose every exposure
overlooked her age

Bend

Grass stained again
the dress I sometimes
wore with you down

to the river with
the dark dark deep
shapes where we bend

into eachother below again
into the surface of still
deeper things than eyes

Then I lost in yours so
often forgetting I change
my thoughts of you the

passion lasts and slowly
again the unbuttoning of me
encouraging laughter

another change of view to
offer you another fleshly soft
hand or a foot or touch

my hair or face asking
nothing in return saying
so much more than language

a conversation of bodies
extends and covers beyond
silty soft deposits of riverbank

with its long grass growing
upwards where we lay down
how carefully we listen

Morning

And so this morning lights up
All the despairing immobile corners
All the chairs where grief shabby sat
The gardens, your little house, my studio
It touches our skin and our children’s
skin and our belongings and our aching
heads, it fills out the bleak day after
the blackened night after the wailing
day of screeching red news

It lights up all the busy things in these
clanging hours of redundant framings

It detonates the silence of that desolate
sleep we went to bed for, pushes into the
past those hours of brief escape from
this sadness that follows this morning
around like a copyist walking crablike
with his heavy hands in his pockets

Implausible Fiction

The sky opened today
with your exhalation.
Lips against mine,
filling my lungs with your unspent air.
We dim-darkened together.
Your dry lips,
I feel the wetness behind them.
We whisper like lovers-
kisses, not because, no
I’ve never made love to you
I feared the hooks, the barbs, the lures
No gills, gasping, arching.
Not because I feared you’d pull me up
to the surface to flap around on your deck.

Kisses, not because, no,
I feared I’d bring down your ship
with me fathoms deep
and drown us both in inky,
bedouin dreams projected on bed sheet screens.
Not that any of this is real
except that I feared.
I see you paper cut wince.
It might hurt more than this,
calculating clever-less.