Shorn
mine is a self I wish I didn’t have
to look at, a head bobbing neckless
on a heath ocean. waves disrupt reflection,
I say, for a bloom born of
a time of temperance, your ticking is lush.
which is to say, I miss afternoons detonating
in the growing sound of insects. limes on the lip.
by the real ocean, scotch broom
covers the path, too much to move through
without rubies beading a scratch. it’s just blood. the hedge overgrows
itself, is filled with spiders cottoning
the barbs, their own catching mechanism, the silk reels
in on itself to its slack droplet. I am the directionless
vertebra digging into a lavender sandbar. such lovely. when
we were new you brought something
out of me, a coil that got fatter as it emerged. a sponge taken from
its plastic pill, and let to soak
* * * * *
Visitation
in the corner a woman’s face
abandons its sharpness
the light on her glasses
she flits away from my
eager hands
floating through contour
conversations
with my mother, her face obscured,
her breath turning
milky, opaque enough to hide her
eyelashes.
When she
was dying, reduced
to a state of yes and no, there were
no more words, she told me
with her eyes, syntax beads
unstringing, replacing
each of my sounds
with a darkening iris, the slighting
dilation between thoughts where is she drifting
in my white or is she just
the darkness
a shadow on shadow, a place my mind
blotted out
in the recess of the sun.
* * * * *
All movement mimics other movement
Small birds that flit
between bushes in December make me
remember movement
as it could be:
a quick sparkle or a hurried arrow through the snow,
hanging baubles along the way.
I imagine a string suspended after each of the starling tails,
and soon the snowy airspace
fills
with a knot dense and beautiful.
It is the shape that ice takes in shallows:
shoals of featherlike fibers
encased in glass
where the grass crosses itself
and pokes up among snow.