Collocation
In the grand canyon of things, have I been calling
to dry sprigs, descending into sediment like
infauna? Late at night making love, peignoir
& a glaciated window, you touched me everywhere
but here. What is warmth if it comes from under
neath the wooden toolshed of your life, sledgehammer
to my peachy desires? The wind bristles with rye
grass. & across the cistern of memory, the rib
cage knows what lives but doesn’t grow. Moths against head
lights. Silence, too, can be rinsed even though it is skin
less. The air. The air. Always the air for
the siloed day opening in a field. In the rear
view mirror, only the flat & wobbly plank sign that reads
hitchhikers may be escaping inmates.
Saudade
The sun slants
on a brambleberry.
It is that season. Creeping
phlox. Everything
too close to touch.
Down—
two common
loons at the edge of the lake drink
their way into each other.
Is this arrival, the knowledge
that alone does
not always mean abandoned?
The man I met on my way here
decelerates, nods, then is forced
forward by the thing he leashes.
Behind, in the plum grove
flushed with last night’s rain,
waxwings rise
& disappear.
Othuke, where language fails,
may a hand sprout for you. E
