Some nights i feel the night, in my lungs, in my hands, in my eyes like orphaned tears

some nights i taste absent salt and roses, sometimes my tongue bites itself and my hands wait
like kids at a winter bus stop

some nights i hold Jemmy and marvel at how far i've moved with her as my crutch, up and down stairs, on the escalator of emotion and the wonder of fear - and the fear in wonder,
tho that taste can be hotsmoothsweet, like buttermint...

some nights i go silly,
wonder if i stretch up high enough, if i can hold that Texas sky like a dark blue blanket, and keep the sun in his nap

and i stretch
and stretch
and stretch, hearing my bones creak like masts in the daybreeze of the highest noon, when the air so hot it wants to be cool again, it remembers, but it only knows how to be hot, beating the ocean like a rug on a line

and in that breeze
my heart moves like sails
beating against itself
flailing about to catch the wind
that'll move me

before those sails tear

again







"There are times that walk from you like some passing afternoon
Summer warmed the open window of her honeymoon
And she chose a yard to burn but the ground remembers her
Wooden spoons, her children stir her Bougainvillea blooms

There are things that drift away like our endless, numbered days
Autumn blew the quilt right off the perfect bed she made
And she's chosen to believe in the hymns her mother sings
Sunday pulls its children from their piles of fallen leaves

There are sailing ships that pass all our bodies in the grass
Springtime calls her children 'till she let's them go at last
And she's chosen where to be, though she's lost her wedding ring
Somewhere near her misplaced jar of Bougainvillea seeds

There are things we can't recall, blind as night that finds us all
Winter tucks her children in, her fragile china dolls
But my hands remember hers, rolling 'round the shaded ferns
Naked arms, her secrets still like songs I'd never learned

There are names across the sea, only now I do believe
Sometimes, with the windows closed, she'll sit and think of me
But she'll mend his tattered clothes and they'll kiss as if they know
A baby sleeps in all our bones, so scared to be alone"

this is a thousand goatskin drums thrumming a good night to you across the acrosses
this unsong travels up rivers, dives from cliffs, and skipsoars over treetop canopies
it surfs zephyrs and rolls across sleeping grasses
it curls on and flings itself around tall flowerparts
it is a wave of silk and summer cinnamon
it slides from ice to other ice to water
it traces across you
there
and there
and there again
it is memory, and tomorrow
it is now and just a second ago
and the moment you come back to it


the feathers of absence
this unever
the whimwarden denied
the sidemanifested starshine
embertouch of
not








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