bookshelf: requiem for the orchard

Stillness is an acre, and his body / idles, deep like heavy machinery

I'm trying to remember how everything settles down // after a fire.

Sky-eyed, / I would endure octaves

I still don't know what resides at the back of one's mouth. / All of it is forgery: steel to stone and wood to bone.

the whirlpool eats itself, petal by petal--then the whole rose / into a blackened stem.

the inverse of this world must be full / of constellations

the voice of my mother / through the electric fan chopped into bits.

disappointment hung in our faces, but / we shucked it off

The loon jerked / then folded like a napkin

candle-sure

The heart pumps its box of inks.

the bric-a-brac of the closet was a visual ache.

In the mirror, I was all fishbone.

There was nothing to do / except disguise my life as the next.

The world / was the shock of wasps, and wine passed from the mouth / of a bottle between boys. Time was a polished balloon.

this woman's thigh, dark / like the perpendiculars I had bleached all summer

The sky / was unpinned

the stars, muddy in the swath of factory steam

Road kill / streak by in their infinite suicides, pelt after pelt

our brown skins, dappled / with paint and insect bites, were as pastoral as the understory / which held all things in its cold radiance.

there are mysteries more merciful than the dark.

the past's nameless paperwork

The surfers practice / their cursives on the waves.

you look so / kindred, so swift, so uncaught.

the lots filled with grasshoppers / could scissor me out of summer's bright face.

Winds have knocked over the feeders // and I've stopped setting out suet but still they come-- / like little nudges, little threads tied to my thumb.

barbed wire fence cut its meandering spine

because my adoration was an anchor // like a blackberry thorn on her dress

the sun now has just / hid like a child behind a fish tank

Small mouth / sipping breath, you are fish-strange

quick gust cuts / dead branches from the pine and the drifts / lock our cars in. But I'm still counting-- / the non-stars in the winter sky, / each hazily wrapped and strobing.