I don’t know when we slept
but it must have looked like
water trapped under ice
that first
a hip against the half-light
_____________
Tides break every day
on this much-ordered planet
I can’t say which is worse
old silence or new
but my teeth grow flat
from grinding this single chaff
_____________
We are composites of water and bone
adult
I only glimpsed your summer face
sudden like an auburn wing
against the gray and broken sidewalk
_____________
I don’t know what I could have said
but night wears its antler of stars
which is at turns raw
and square
Sleep blankets breath
and this hails for knowing
what we gained in sharpness
we lost in feeling
23
I finger a peace
lid over the rest
No matter what I try
I waver and forget
that the branch is broken
and my belly is against it
_____________
What we knew in winter
did connect
the summer’s drawn-out pile
of clothing, noise and grief
No one could live that way
and the light I saw
up over and to my right
was not ours
if you find this
it’s already too late
and nothing replaces that
except for a tautness I can’t match
that rises up
and then behind
like silence for some greater skin
_____________
The timelines we follow
are for teeth to erupt
a plane to scale
a certain falling to ascend
I knew you for an hour
I know you for lost
a coil, a spring
24
a breach
is what we work at
and make with our time
Nostrils are for the intake of air
this comes first
and these buttons for flight
are the membranes we must survive
because return is lidded
cloud-shaped green
and irregular at best
_____________
So beneath is hardly a song
breath brain fin
salt mouth harrow
vein and heart corporeal
and canned
the trestled meat of the chest
by which we judge moon, sound and eye
still faulty and warm:
you stoved me up is what
what you did is stove me up
so that I’ll never put an ear to it without wondering.