Night Work

All summer, the city engine's low

roar capsizes our bodies into sleep,

groans,

evacuation—

Lost to a watery

anamnesis so warm it requires a raft

thatched from death's

flotsam to necklace its shore

I swim on, calling your name

In my dreams, something is always deserting

But tonight, no fast shadows of birds

No oceanic flowers disrobing butterflies

or bright beach of child's porridge and bones—

Instead, someone weaving

a net from fallen hair in and around our bed

to catch the breath, blood, and ritual

motions that oiled us

as one candle in a cave

In your dreams, someone is always resisting being saved

My teeth are on fire, you say I said

Don't fly for the labyrinth, once

I thought you were admonishing me to go away

I don't remember most others, a thousand seasons

phonographed in through a wounded window

Everyone can't have a cactus

Just o.k. empty all the rice from my legs

Once I awoke screaming, paws red-hot embers

You opened my mouth and poured a night-cold river in

Once you died and my heart fished all winter

Once we were eating lunch inside a kiln

Once you thought you smelled death,

but the lavender farm was too large to shave

On the fifth straight morning I'd dreamt of water

I stared at your face, its nacreous lids,

and I swear I could see a Glorious Ghost shifting

over your sun-warm waves

Water my birth sign, and one day my mother's death

that protect-fills my love with sadness

There, in words to my coworkers

it was still dripping, in my nods

over a galapagos of pages and forms

All love is immigrant, that autumn apparently

I mumbled

Your reply, after days: Turn off the steam in the trees

Somewhere right now, two lovers are conversing

without even knowing what their lives mean

One's heart gazelle-quick to survey a mountain his dead

father is always vandalizing

The other frequently misplacing her hair, ears, or self-

sabotaging a crime

One usually struggling to stay alive

The other often untethering something

Or is it my mitochondria that powder-sugars the moon?

And you calcifying a promise inside to inscribe?

There is a dominion where inverses

invert until only terror, love, and imagination cling,

heavy, on human branches—enter your vista, phylum

unsequenced, dimmer deeds

Can you hear it tonight?

Wind in iron jars buried inside the living:

Grandmothers, past spouses, cable men, priests

Now! I finally manage

as our train smokes out all the rats on their bed of leaves

All night, I dive

down to the soft structures of some blue civilization's faith

In this myth of life, I keep forgetting whose ideas and

sensations I'm supposed to be

Come morning: rain, trees, silvery

sleet

and daily, this new fresh bounty

we share, side by side

like angels coming home from work at a pearl factory

Source: Whorled (Coffee House Press, 2011)