Cedar

I am crushed
between the top of the sky

and the jagged lamps
of the city below

This is the only way
to talk of

being massaged gradually
to openness

left afterwards

in the pummeled air
free to move and do

watching the cedars burn
as though lit by my hand

For Detroit

I am close enough
to the city

it is shelves
of light

it falls off
like a noose

I make a drawing
of the noose

it falls
as though
I am a ledge

I draw
the ledge

it falls like guilt
cold,
shining

if I draw
the buildings fill
with rivers, trees
birds

I beg to plow

open the mouth
of guilt

soil and creatures
spilling out

Upon Your Return

alone in the house
with few sounds

sometimes an
insect bumping into
the panes

pouring over maps
stacking books
just so

the breeze
sucks my hands
out the window

living in this
smashed down
skyline

it's been easier
to write
nothing at all

avoiding language
by moving it
in heaps
around the room

this morning
it won't lie still

barking out of
my fingertips
until

I tell you
this is the real
beginning

every morning
love
will be pressed into
our palms

like a coin from
a doting relative

the rough sketch of an inability to write

there are no words to eat
the city is barren
I can't see anything

poetics
lost to

to bricks

this world in the morning
is a quick heat
and feeling nothing

perhaps only a need
to be lifted up
by my hair

but what do I know
of this immaculate season?

finding things from within
is murk, like river bottom
and the last sip in the glass

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