I’m getting versed in the unspeakable: the architecture of a lung, tributaries of veins, and pain, all kinds: white-hot, bone-ache. Removed from all contexts a bruise can be beautiful: pastel, galactic, nascent. The way skin grows up against a suture, shifting dunes. If all goes well, we replace ourselves. This is the brachial, this the subclavian— remember, a life is motion, and nothing less.
[1] New construction, half this city is empty, prematurely gutted. Dark blocks, wide swaths of light and the knife-edge of a night, designed for carving. Such an uncomfortable clarity that comes at these hours, hurtling blindly at a great rate of speed, every second falling free from the world until the earth rolls up again to meet our feet .
The gingko again, new leaves faint at the edges, a hesitating green, tempered ebullience, middle spring. What is inside is petrified, a relic, scared, and sacred. All weekend long, a promised rain that never really arrived, and so it goes, the hour, the day, half-measured, half-guessed at– an imprecise heart can still feel exacting.
The blue of day becomes the blue of night. Low jet planes tracking their way down, the flame of a heater inside its glass tube, genie-like, what would I wish for? More light, or lightness, whatever quality it is that becomes so pronounced in its absence. That I could soften this pumice heart, abrasive, with all its pockets of emptiness. Another song of another sparrow. That I would finally know better. That a night would stay […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 