There You Are
After Timmy Straw
In the cedar-grey light, filtered through the walnut—
in the small silver stirring in the bat’s wing
as an osprey turns up river. That coyote run through once,
then twice, you in the sound of its steps made in rain.
You, the fulcrum that levers indigo into constellation.
You, the charred instability, the field of boreal
fireweed renewing the earth with its rosy process—
there, in the x-ray of your back on a clothespin
in the translucent morning, you asked the doctor
for a copy of the bone-break because: it looked cool—
tea with milk, marmalade on rye, your thin, blue frame
a window of vertebrae, and there again, once more,
in an empty pool of silken esses—smoking in the sidelong
inversions of early evening, tearing, mending, tearing again
the thawed headwaters of a future spring—
yes, there, in what ails, in ordnung,
the journeying body that departs
from the boxcar and rhymes feign with clay—
disastrous, scarlet, you know, there,
in the comet tail of a crane’s wing,
the early bear, knocking orchard apples
into dark thuds of color like stones
beneath a creek, like the loon in each
of its hushes, and you, a shadow more real
than its body, saying this is it.
Mystery Box
In a decommissioned fire lookout, I search for distance.
Four stories high, glass and splinters.
A vulture below, like a pendulum above the swale.
There are stars here that are only here.
There are love notes written to them in a book.
A landline and a knifed moon.
Rain gusting under the eave.
Everywhere, emptying into its invisible walls.
You are in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainment.
You are windowless and splintering.
You are so many windows.
Eight months pass before they send you off in chains.
You are an American ritual.
I am an American ritual.
Again, you call—thinking to kill yourself in a forest.
You don’t.
Instead, you rent an east facing apartment.
An absent shade on the horizon.
In the evening, I stand under a yellow pine for as long as it takes.
In the morning, I spot a bear in the same place at 6:38am.
I Will Never Know You And Call You Best Friend
Strange how a stranger eyes the future dark of who you will never be, but echo.
Why did you crush the blackberries in my hands before you photographed them?
A field of rye grass at sunset.
At City Lights, I bought four books of poems and the store clerk asked if I was at Berkeley.
No, I said.
Well, we stay open late, sometimes until midnight if you ever want to come by.
Strange how a stranger looks into your echo.
In the shade of a Japanese maple, the guide of the Alfred Hitchcock tour quotes Cary Grant:
Everyone wants to be Cary Grant, even I want to be Cary Grant.
In California, we cliff jumped with a painter who told you he cheated on his wife.
Some secrets stay with you—he said into the tiled floor.
The dull high of butane in the wet mouth of Byron Glacier.
The wild donkeys in the future dark.
We drank a bottle of sangiovese on the fog snuffed cliffs in Finisterre.
We see no end of earth.
The ice cave collapsed.
I went to the free entry day at the Thyssen.
Fuck me. I own a Rothko sprayed on the glass.
You walk fast into the future dark of who you will never be.
Your head turned up and over your shoulder.
On Why
Then you will be in an hour so still, a snap in the pine duff is that of creation
*
Afterall, that’s the why of anything that’s gotten between us
*
The why of the robin’s nest we found tucked off the trail in an alder arm
*
Full of futures lengthening into a boiling light—
*
A red in the dawn so still, you’d think the evergreens might just drain into darkness
*
You’d think the northern home I once knew had just now begun to frost back into surface
*
But no. This is hard as in heat. As in a hard burning. Oak. Madrone. Open-flue, creosote-free
*
This is the sugar pines I will always over-love
*
In that perfect place where I first fell vacant
*
Down by the green river where absences come like wasps to a picnic
*
It’s far easier to talk about loss than it is to talk about love, that’s bell hooks
*
And these days it’s far easier to talk about you than it is the sky—
*
Above the sky, I could forget (remember)
*
But there you are, in the mussel shell caught in the light, nestled in the banks of its green wind
*
In the split shards of a woodpecker making why after why above the nettle—
*
Rain smears wildflowers across the burnt edge of a parking structure and I smile at my eventual death
*
The frog in the pond we thought to be a bird
*
The lily pads just yet releasing their white capes
*
We stopped for strawberries at the farmstand that runs produce on the honor system
*
My hands, suddenly frail as I folded the bills into the lockbox
*
And then that Peregrine falcon, come talon-less between us
*
It was the half-life of our living
*
It was amber poured into a hive of sleeping bees
*
But we know better than to trust reflection
*
Water in any of its forms
*
That the sky is the only thing asked for in its beginning and its end