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Under a lemon sky I pick the swirls
of a dead bird. Thrilling
ribbons in the snow.
In my perfect world it would grow dark
from the inside out and cars
would drive one hundred
miles, at least.
The trees would all be bright
blue.
Everyone but me
would know how to drive, drive me.
Everyone I don't want
to touch would disappear.

Opium (after Jean Cocteau)

Autumn is the lungs' nostalgia.
Sunlight bathing phosphorescent silks
inside the body's water.
Swim in circles.
Small crystals, discovery or instinct.
As when I step outside a palace
of trees
a glass wall falls
apocolypse of sun
loosening a fist.
Opium rising,
recall
a fragrance smeared between us.
A word whispered into the mouth,
the ear asleep.

fragment

to be so hungry, radio
event
the mind

so much
unwanted

Ricky's Night Terrors

When he was five
he was troubled
by the
straight line -
the existential
implications
woke him up
in the middle
of the night, screaming.

Forty years later, his eyes
dark as a lake
bottom, he fingers
the edge of the table.

A Poem By Emily Dickinson

I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.
The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable, and then
There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.

Nocturne III

Blue hour, evening water.
The rough outline becomes
invisible but to the finger-
tip
it speaks.
The way vowels feel
their way through a motion
into the mouth.