the long snarl

of a rising sun

the day in infancy

born of inwardness

the flight of the morning

same grace for forgetting

with memories in torrents

with its streamers

of spider web silk

I imagine

somewhere you

are standing at the other end

rubbing out all these

mute sensations

the worthless scribes

of a day's erasure

Testimony of a Husband’s Death

Everything was silent

I heard someone crying

alone in the woods

there is no tree

strong enough to lean on.

Everything was silent

the sun left

there was only stillness

and the delicate release

of a dagger drawn out.

*

Through dense trees

the sun is smaller

the woman in tears

is harder to see, past the bushes

a life is being taken

by her hand, now a cradle

for remorseful cheeks

soft splinter of sun, catches the blade

in union of the dead and the living

both silent and remote.

The Embrace

As if it were a vacuum

a single instant swallows me

and I am in the bag

with the rust

of all other floors

in assembly.

I look out, from a long corridor

from where the look has no beginning,

each shape that makes your face,

A prism.

You and I, clasped in everlasting embrace,

are made eternal by being far away.

From Where We Are

How lucky

to be the one

who waits for you,

have you come toward me

From where all that's unrecognizable

is released,

every color a blanket

From where our silence goes on

up against walls of words and sound.

If only I could get so close to it

crawl into the living

shutter of your noiseless breath

to where we can be kept

and nothing is said.

u-1 and other poems

A Viennese bunk bed

A lone cry beside you

Could not keep you

From tangling toward the door

The pillow, as it folds, at the nape

Is wet with a flattened face

All the people of the day

Dissolve with it

And in the semi-empty bedroom

The only things left

Are the ones I couldn’t have.

U-1

Corked by the people we are

The faces we have grown into

And decided to keep

In the bedrooms

We’ve deserted

Traces of sleeping shoulders,

There is a pile of wrappers

That haven’t been taken out yet.

The pieces of ourselves

Crammed into bread crumbs

Of a devoured loaf

Are left in these places.

Soon the rooms that contain them

Will be over run

And lived by them.

Orphean Altitudes

You are not far behind me.

You appear to me still,

In airplane dreams

I wake up

mid-ocean

above the ground

we’ve been erased from.

Invisibility is a most certain death.

Faces in a Rear View

Through the double-blinded curtains

torrent silence

walls let out with shutters

already condemned to forgetting

and the trills

of yesterday's laughter

already, a most certain death.

The door flings open

and is given life.

we are all alone

nobody has seen us.

For Phil, On the Anniversary of his Death

Your footsteps

Coming upon my door

The greatest of your secrets, revealed

Just before it’s opened.

My mouth, eclipsed

Then wholed by a bewailed breath

Knowing the sounds taken in

Are lived by them.

When I come up,

Against your forehead

Your militiant order

To be seen by your battered eye

Vague with knowness

Something like an august arm

Abasing closeness.

A year later,

There are empty sock drawers

In the walk-in,

There are antique bicycles

In the basement

That are getting older.

On the thought of living

I wonder,

How is it, that this room

Has become embalmed

With you absence.