You’re arrowing out toward what.

The sunlight almost unfaceable, and weightless,
and the gravities, wind-flickers, shadows, the ripped
black places crows make on the phone poles—

how to keep your own counsel,
even against the little stabs, the winds and chromes—

                                              •

Various flashes, the office door, a supper glass, a last
smear of streetlight on the bedsheets.

Nothing. On into the soaring, black release.

                                              •

The messages say syllabus and vetting that
and will be absent. Nothing.
On into the what? the air you’re gliding on
or falling from,
                              the wind of it making
ahs and salves in the hollow of your chest,
Celina of a bodily sibilance like willows,
of the shimmering, midsummer glance.

You would allow yourself a message.
How to make it low-key. How to keep it to a few lines.

                                              •

On into the wind of whatever is happening.
What leashes you seems to have come undone.

You lean down into the white heap of black words.
You pad out toward the water fountain
into someone’s eyeshadowed look, the lush backwash of her skirt.

You weigh maybe three or four
ounces, swirling down the stairwell

in whichever wind this is, your ribs
aching with what they
sing so shamelessly.

Source: Poetry (February 2012)