Piecemeal

A word is sound seeking
the place of its hearing:

breath-ballast forged toward
the ear in the throat’s shell.

Riven, arrive.

To do the opposite of covet:
allude, allure,

strive the path into being,
hunger until you taste
like an animal.

Do nothing and things
will be transmuted,

especially the phalanx of your doings:

abyss for god-gestures

Alert to scents behind stars, behind
twintwisting alphabets, leaf-etched messages–

Mindfold, the deerdark eye

Grass-split and then

skystalks the
kestrels climb

This plodding omniscience, not
to be complete until
we have inhabited each

thing, and every
time, forget.

We are earth’s
young it devours with
their own ravenous kisses.

Goldenrod. Your smiling stride
beside me. So much light,
I can only cast shadows inward.

Only what is “mine”
must be repented

with rhythm-rutted words, smoothed across tongues,

what newly beckons
me never to arrive.

Pulse, a quality
of stars and hearts.

We come and go.
We waver, even while we stay.

Each receipt’s scroll
is a song, call and response:

Desire …….. Cost

What is a question (of what stuff)
that pressed into the world, a hint returns?

What is the world (of what love)
that it answers?

Seeing my children’s faces:
how beautiful I might have been,
even now.

Pleasure and suffering hum at the edges:

the skin of rain, its swollen voltage.

How many leaves
wrestle through
their own bodies
to light

These things have been said before
but there is no before

and will be said again
but there will never be again.

A white moth’s petals cling
to a grass-stem.

I am not meant
to be anything.

To be a-
part, touched
by that sun in the sand.

To be eaten, as to eat.

The sea absorbs our feelings, hopes, imaginings…
all but our negligence.

Is desire the price of beauty?

Here my only past
is your face, creased with reactions.

Apart from this, there is only away.

Before you know it,
the sand in the wave’s wall
is the shore.

My words fade, sure
as the furious
airplay of starlings
between the deep peaks.

Midwest: a sky sutured
with wires and toothpicks,

A budgeted beauty,
mowing the interrupted plains.

Death exudes fear, which latches onto sin:
power or pleasure, control or abandon.