From “Coosa”

To be a bride of my own lamentation

I wear a dress not of time’s poisoned quills

but feathers of discontent — kingfishers

ghosting in cornstalks, my field of frozen flutes.

The edge of descent, digression’s highway

brings a particulate ash to my mouth,

starry metals of the meadow’s cold snap,

ravens in the sycamore scorched to black.

I follow their echo’s loop and chase.

I master the map of never, raft

its fragments, mouth the brightness of human’s

leftover snow, details of fever-clouds

where the convent dissolves in violence.

I wear the canyon like a blank eye,

lay before the never-returning light

my silhouette, fossil of the drowned town’s scroll.

•

Here, where your ghost is always departing

the ebb and flow of terrestrial tides,

I follow your echo’s loop and chase,

vortex streets of a cylindrical sound

infinite in its arrangements of light.

The evening veil, a partial reveal — 

how I appear to myself looking past

this fact of being underway. Each day

I stow my earthen materials

in preparation for the never-end.

In the snapshot of my dead friend, hanging

in the room where loved ones refuse return:

a gradual reduction of color.

Running out of time, neck-deep in water,

we knew no one was coming to help us

in the same way one denies language

to come from a picture. I imagine

love a revelation, not of mind — 

the blue gauze of planetary motion — 

a tone-on-tone painting of a body

floating on the sea’s shifting horizons.

It is a question of legibility.

When I became tired of depicting

poetry, I became aware of

another kind of plane, the kind

good for dwellings and their narrative escape.

Here children sit up all night by the flames — 

the orphan boy from blood-stained pottery

who singed his head and burned out both his eyes.

That was your life, a prefix for fire.

Spider will weave a ladder to your heart,

it is said, even though you are sleeping,

intoxicated by abandonment,

a bitter wind reminiscent of a wave.

•

In the last days of my marriage to god,

I wandered his spiraled library

to read in the dark blank imprints of trees.

Relentless navigation through the stacks

of shell-tempered mortuary offerings,

sandstone saws recovered from the caves.

I lingered on the stairs of the convent

to write these things, to recollect myself.

Around midnight the mountains returned.

The clouds dispersed into semicolons

and I with them, into a new language,

its boat temporary, invisible.

I knew I would be traveling like this

for centuries. This was my first attempt

at vanishing. I would return before

anyone noticed poems to be found

in the forest, not the mind.

There’s a canyon between this version of me

and the shadow in the corner that is mine.

I wear this canyon like a blank eye.