The wealth of networks leading me
through
channels where fat rivers once ran
yawning to the promise of irrigating an
arid landscape
man’s ultimate testimony to controlling
nature
laid down lines that combined to make
his house
Twilight stained and filling in yellow
like nicotine from
traces of a summer weeks sun
to hold your language so subtle
it’s grace a membrane over our everyday
in
a manner that orders a building of
meanings that are
found under willows and threaded bark,
a grey, dried from the beach sun.
I bring the images of films that
dragged down these concrete river beds
like
a mattress small enough to run or walk
to
parallels forging feather and sponge
with
an impression of your body
To melt and spread
furrowing into hurdles of plenty
the threshold of our nation, the edge
of our culture
the end of our continent where ocean
and fiberglass are
traded for asphalt and wheels
A sublime that renders indifferent the
nuzzling of your cheek on
a pillow of dried beans
Slipping against each other to rustle
the corners of that east coast
a shadow of your former self removed
from
your previous life that we haven’t
shared that
I don’t really need to know until
you are ready to tell me,
a trust I forgot was possible
when I don’t need to have details to
string through
our conversations weaving a past that I
was drenched in discovering through the
telling.
a desert in another lifetime,
defied and jingling from the twilight
of
a warbling heresy
a litany of calls into a still night
when
the rest of them were slumbering with
their beaks tucked under the inner edge
of their wing or
the wing of another that whisked
through my breath and words to grant
all my wishes.
