Can I Be With You
It seems to be an extremely difficult time, and also whatever the opposite of that might be.
With a little humming through a few streets down to the tingling wretched houses
Full of light
I melted the polar ice caps, flooded your dream hands.
The thought of you, star, desolate and purring heartsick into your
Floating silverware
Has never left me
Nor my two pisces wanderers, who hoist me up another declivitous rebuke
Should I thank them for bringing me to you? Do I dare
Look into your eyes
The bus makes me static in a precise way.
My edges are kept tight and thin by things that pass at such close quarters.
The trees are thrown into gusts of intense light, stinging and I hide from it.
I try to make time run through me instead of around,
Just like those who grow up on farms do.
Just like you, next to me, drinking in each feverishly illuminated spectacle,
In and out of sleep.
Fish
Slowly, with the dynamic of the anemone, you leave my house.
For about thirty minutes I was an impatient bedside table, you were traveling through a deep sleep
I felt your dreams whispering out of your fingers and toes. Shifting my weight, waiting, debating
When you will emerge. We heard a car sigh down the road, we heard the dark chorus of snow caroling
It was not a choice for my heart to be so moved, you sit up, only to feel the cold, I welcome you back
We’re upside down and very close, making no noise, you decide to hold onto consciousness, you see me
I’m not sure if I want to replace your dreams, I’m not sure what it means to be pulled closer
But it excavates some deep sensation I had never uncovered, it flexes its twittering muscles
I finally hold you, until time slithers back into its hole of light, or until you must be home
Slowly, in the awe of dusk, you unlock your car and make footprints into space, you’re tired and
You pull away down the street in a cloudy trail, leaving me shocked at myself
We can for so long ignore the depressed economy of winter nights, especially
Feeling so full staring down the road
Kaboom
Our friends all knew about the broken couch, called me wild for it,
They didn’t know it was the head and neck of a swan, the last bird that ever lived,
Yeah we fucked on a swan head. It’s a pearl, an ancient planet made of sadness.
The water spreads for its entry, its velvet neck half the width of a wrist
Movements, seemingly calculated in their balance, synchronize every heartbeat in the forest, even evil ones.
Its neck broken, its barrel chest quivering, its brain fizzing in its eyes with glittering light
Someone died, in the bow of the swan’s neck, the curve of half a heart,
Someone lay there, swallowing big gulps of air, watching the ceiling grow smaller,
Pounding in the heavenly space between knees, seeing stars, they’re the imprint
Of glow in the dark stars before the room was redone to be more
Mature
The crack bounces us into a spiral, you grow close and hug me, did you ask if I was okay
It is what I want to know more than anything, what I can’t hear, it’s us finding a dead woodpecker, it’s neither of us breathing and waiting for the world to spin again
Someone died thinking about what your room looked like
When you were a little boy
Lake Ontario III
Where are the seeds in the raspberries?
Are there any? I am unused to questioning gently.
When did you learn to learn to skip rocks, and who taught you?
What water? Did you ever fail? I can’t picture it.
Think of when I tugged your hands, told them come into the water
-
I wanted you to feel the space beneath us, feel our floating, feel the
Negative space between us / and the below.
Were you afraid? Could you tell I was?
Leaving the water first, I gave you the towel for the water in your hair.
I’m sure most of it landed on my shins when you emptied it from your head
Like a little dog / Did you see my face? It was turned towards
Our friend, to tell him, There has never been so much water
In one lake than this
He was so confused!
For he had not swam.