She Looks After You

What to do with nothing. What to do with mercy but give it a goddess and sell it as statuettes on the street. From the river the afflicted send monkeys with food money. They wait out winter in riverboats, watch bodies float by, watch the wind fire bullets of ice into pilings and trees. No birds is a bad sign. Jet engines overhead instead, angry throats masked in cloud. Perhaps they’ve dropped food in the dark. It parachutes into the river, the idea of it. The goddess in the river too, dragging it like grace upstream to the docks. All the monkeys wailing at the gunwales. All the hands holding poles into the night, certain it’s their own she will take hold of and weep.

Telegrams. In the Dark.

Goodbye failed dreams. In which the inspectors. Are never satisfied. O toothy clipboards. And forceps. O pinching. Probing. Come. Snake your cameras in. My canals and cochlea. Brace open the eyelids. I wake. Angry. At the spring rustle of life. The mad sun. Grinding into view. Aching to burn holes. In us. In our frantic rodents. O angry kinglets. Sharpening your beaks. On laurel branches. Who shall you like. To peck to death? No reason. To hurry. Two beagles. On ropes. Yarded. Digging a pit. They want. It to be over. A truck. On the street. Has an angry heart. Little man pumping. The pedals. Pounding. The wheel. He’s going. Nowhere. He’s taking. Nothing. With him.

Supernova

Tonight the birth of snow, a dream so deep we touch the very other edge. You are the white bird there on a branch hanging over. You, a bright figment of accumulated flakes. I reach to touch, thinking of lips. Dark tongue on tongue. I kiss a breath-hole through the drifts and your distant dead song tunnels in. Blue notes against the brights of my eyes. The heft of long hours under soft blankets of sleep under blankets of black stars. To wake means to gently snuff out or explode. I am gathering white walls about me. I am drawing you in like a throat with the rough idea of song.