Parting the Smoke Curtain onto a Curtain of Smoke

Radiowoman declares

Our strategy is to remain.

So say it as if you’ve got

a million years to say

it sounds true.

If only I had such power,

such rabia so simple

as to divinate the concentric

tumors of deep space.

And when is the breast

not mouthy mystery

or the grief that walks different

on everyone, but just the thing

itself? the divided continental

where I part

the bitterroot clouds?

A shiny little number

wraps around the guardrail

of Beartooth cosmology.

I saw it from afar. Fall where

everyone falls. Under the

Dipper. In the aspen grove.

The Night My Dead Dog Comes Back

It wasn’t cancer, turns out. Or my fears

of dropping her from the stairs the way it happened

in a dream, her hindquarter snapping

as bloodless as a frozen stick of fish.

It wasn’t anything but the universe skipping

ahead somewhere near the end and coming

back on the middle it took with it—the dust

and stars and dogs, something extragalactic

in the mix, and no, the cancer, how it filigreed

among her esophageal strands same year that boy

from high school seized up behind the steering wheel

of his benz, never really anything more than occasional

transient clusters unaccounted for in the galaxy

moving on toward some blacker denser point

—that boy still explicably in his job teaching a language

to students who stay the same age—luckily,

my dog tells me, in this new real none of that

was real—I didn’t lay my body among tarbushes

outside Acropolis to let some Marcos pull down

my top with the hand that wasn’t unzipping—

the body that never existed can’t become this body

—even the julienne I make of my thumb

tonight streams away from me to some

cosmic core—there was no embracing this or

that trickylittlelie the nine-tenths moon told

hanging like a warhead over a child tottering towards

a piece of cheese in an outstretched hand—the endless

blues, the bridge out and out and out

for good—the piston pump of Telephone Ridge

where Cornus Canadensis douses our boots

in infinite nuclei—our just-bloomed connection coming

alive among clumpy distributions of the stellar.