To be young

It's not missing
the moon sinking over
the city,

A deep clementine falter.

Its not missing us,
you sway
in our
used to be

Time
is simple

ours, unerring

I sink to my cigarette knees
Sometimes

Bearing up the memory
A farm field bird

Wood floor wings

The red suspender
Days

Blank Black Print

just this morning

the bodies unearthed,
tallied like
stacked wood

I've seen
the blank black
print,
etched
in undertows


the color of blood
is your new home

You are the good
the do ing
of good

While
my saddle sits at home

my heat snatched up
fled and lifted
into the itch of a jungle

Or the vast binding
of some open plain

The break of me, look

So that
beyond communications
and slender
future
we might talk a while

Squirming through months
I'll watch the columns

Those whispers of genocides
and wonder

Horselessness

Strange that this is
January

The earth is
So awake

The colors
Puncture

It is as though
My life never slept

This year
Meant waking

And mostly
The sky

Has been
Underneath me

A Resolution

This year
is elderly

monthly shoulders
sagged in protection

toward a cavernous chest
heavy with days, hours
or crumpled moments


When it was young
the year knew itself
and
told no secrets

Now it quivers
toward me,

ready
to take to
the grave all it
has born

since I do not know
already
I would learn
to tell time for you

For instance,
love is
just a yearling
on lengthy legs

Body of Time

There is the way
Time turns its hide inside out

minutes and guts


Arc of neck, then a spilled
month

I am always in the sun
when the taste of hours
metals its way

Iron and rust against my tongue

Slippery now
is the only balm

when hewn, a hide
makes soft the winter

blind, I live in fleece
and small ticks of motion

my cost
bears up the clocks
turning to feeble and

bone
by bone

centuries peel back their lids

Safe Keeping

your face a pulpit
words silk
out of me

teach me my ear
teeth wrapping around it

worldly,
having eaten
foods of other soils

till me like earth

my mouth softer than cottons
holds your name


and time,

a skidding hash mark
black across gentle

begins to erupt
from our brows


I feel it is so

that life enters us all
in secret

no grand moment, symphonic
and gaping open

only a pleasurable morning
slung easily before

the watchtower of our want

faces pressed against
the glass, learning the pain
of color,

a prologue of hours
until we meet again

Wall Street

there are gamblings
roiling
the paint on houses,

making the leaves peel and the
eaves shake gently


the hunters moon
suspended over
a sea of chalky

middle america
street lamps

marks shouts
like accounts
being balanced
on hot red throats


out in the bigger cities, or
the biggest
the people gather their water
and voices
into one
swollen herd
pregnant with
slogans

mewling against
meadows of money:

someone stop
our highest
abstractions
from blocking the winds
that cool

let the wind shoot
across our plains!


which is when
the little houses on plains
sigh
closed throated

and simply sign the next check.

a body for all seasons

In the color of
forgotten organs,

deep mottled tissues, I find

a world diseased in
joy


in only seeing the edge
of things, I climb up

winter through fall,
planning

the tracks I have yet to make

in yielding snows


my gray body sings
even though its

skin is sloughed into
the sky

I am a dappled season,
the fragrance of rot

firmly loved, utterly welcomed

for its shameless ability
to change

My organs are hidden

in laughing caverns
wearing their colors as though they were crows

Civil

something smells civilized in here

like thunder contained on television

or a yearn,
simply
that


what’s basic here?
a breath between
palms

or words that make sex

in the wild
they
find themselves blue,
immersed,
or only eyes


ask me again

in your
whisper that tears up

a room

like strips of paper.

A Ten Minute Treatise On My Face

my face does
little
and peacefully
pushes air around

it catalogues the moments

a jar full of seasons
cracks

then busts and hangs
from a dry July branch


it is a smile


there are only
so many ways
an egg can taste bitter

the shell, for example

my face does
little to embalm
a minute

it only opens

a yearn for your flavor