Red Bells
Making & unmending, we pursued our faces in the soft wattages
of windows & wrote everything of ourselves into winter.
Until, what?
A time when the smoketree closed over the cut of twinned hearts?
What, was dread. Was my saying: Stay.
I am only good with you.
She went, in the end, to the bridge.
Every surface quivered with night.
The planetary assurance gloomed above
as she broke the water with her body—
asking to be remembered.
To the Shallows
A woman played the cotton high on the upright.
The porch boards coughed
a hairpin of fire lengthwise.
The homestead burned for three days.
Someone kept me heavy with rum & down—
Meaning, this was my song of pale strings,
my small kit of loss.
I gave nothing away.
My center waited, hung with one
slender cymbal.
All my dearests went radiant in catastrophe.
I went lonesome, alluvial,
festering towards sleep.
Kept famine. Took to fixes,
to undoing the last of my angles.
The arctic of my collarbone rattled
against the gulf & end hours.
The waters trembled, sable & unyielding.
A piece of night smoothed in
from the corners of my eyes—
The creatures of late upon me.