commerce

the vast in the sky, the inside
eggshell curve of my night when
even our lights don't punch through the
cover or make it diffuse, i want to sell them to you.

no, no more jade in my mottled ring.

thought strikes the same place once
only, then gone.

BARF.

And just for fun time's sake.......This has no title yet either.


The color of your walls
has no real name.
When I sit on your couch
before the low oblong table
the dark paint, stagnant,
apathetic as mud,
watches from each wide surface.

I play the game of turning
your apartment upside down:
walking up the verticalness
of color, crawling across
the picture frames. I force my hands
into shelf bottoms, scratch
book spines against palms.

Towards the window, parting the
blind slits sideways, the buildings
spear sideways. The cars drive up,
down, and suddenly we are much
lower than ten floors, much higher
than could be allowed --

Feet first, towards the mirror
that hangs over your dinner table.
Your living room multiplied;
Sickness, an obscure shade.

Can't think of a title, but this is part of an upstairs meditation. It's very undone.


Black, jagged tar pieces
came dropping from the roof
and piled onto the driveway.

A furious pounding above: all day
the heat pressing down on furniture,
breathing through the window screens.

Footsteps of the muscled men,
the giant men, shaking the ceiling,
dragging their boots over our routine:
The blood of an Englishman.

Our cats could smell it from under the beds,
the dust of all our days clogging up
the drains and filling up the rooms,
which have never transformed once --

Not into closets heaped with small radios,
like in some dreams, or into
soundless swimming pools, from which
water disappears, suddenly.

They are as always:
stationary, too old to grow.

No dark attic either for the men to stomp through --
the sun exposing them, browning
their knotted skin with
a harsh, yellow eye.

Immigration, age 6

When I was real
the moon grew fat.
The broad leaves of the tree hid mothers, light.

In six years, one memory of rain, sieved from
hailstones the size of fists. Ice burst to the ground,
then melted.

That country
changes every seven years, a water clock
dredging up buildings, billboards, and, once,
the body in sheets by the side of the road we don't come near—

the away mind

the ciphers of the
monk, from when he counted notes at vespers
and numbered the fingers
remain arcane as grapes, wood.

no roads arrow, no roman rooms
are lit--yet
the little cell knows itself.
remembers a thousand times over, the divide.

on string, beads chase fingers

the inner ear curls inward strict like prayer