I
If I should die before I wake
I pray the lord my soul to take.
But if my dreams some wonder show
I ask him that he let me go.
Space wrecks hell on mortal minds.
II
Last night, I closed my eyes
around midnight
and slept for unknown eons.
I travelled up
and up and up
and made claws of my hands
to tear through the atmosphere.
I floated serene across silent spans
of violet shadow
dots of light seen mostly by night
expanding to fill my view—
and then I met the moon.
out of the gray afternoon it might begin—the creation of the world. in the sound of a snow shovel scraping on ice and in the slush that remains a kind of ex nihilo is generated. from nothing. certainly from nothing. in the birthing of worlds there are no principles only the appearance of that which did not exist before and that now is. that now irrefutably is. where once the cosmos was simply gray expanse and the waters then below, or even the gathering of all things in one small, great magnitude, there is now the gray afternoon. no diving for worlds in the great sea. no trickster. nothing. a flock of dying geese crosses the new sky in a v that tapers to oblivion. a dog howls to no answer in the distance. his leg is broken and he is looking for a culvert to hide in. surely, they have come. in this world the names are stripped one by one and a first and last lonesome forked creature with twelve fingers and no face ticks off the forgotten. ah, yes. this swirling mass of creation, this pool of dim color that rises in the deep of the gray and seems to nod to the cracked moon above—this is genesis. the names fall off each and each wanders to their glory in a desert of rock and gray sun. a world. a new world.
I. Rowing
I am setting out on this water not to drift but to row, since this not loving you has drawn from me almost as much as loving you once did, and nothing is as full as a boat by itself in a sea that does not end.
II. Barn Ruin
We found it at the edge of the woods that August you wouldn’t touch me, just a skeleton of walls and poison ivy climbing all the way to the caved-in roof, triple leaves bigger than hands and glossed to the point of dripping, and it was almost pretty, all those edges hooked against each other, baring back a tessellated light, just as long as we didn’t come close.
III. Tide
I was not afraid you would hurt me, but that you never would, that you would never even peer between these ribs I’ve hinged apart for you, until the wind will do to me what it does to all soft creatures left behind by the tide, and the only sound my throat can make will be the sound of robin nests unraveled in a storm.
In Nordic mythology Sleipnir is Odin’s steed, the foal of Loki and Svaðilfari
I am fastened to the skim-race of a sly night.
Shadows fall, tin pots clank, slab-roofs trill.
My eyelids stutter. A silhouette before me – equine-like,
up-folded wings, serrations of fine spine-feathers.
A shadow-foal, a rider with a ghost-drawn face, lines
ploughed by a brazen sun or a blistering frost.
There’s the fit-fickle thunder-hiss of a merciless wind: all clinker,
the slag of irradiated soil, metal shards, eyelets, pinions,
grease, the multifarious detritus of battle. Odin seeks his revenge.
I run from the ankle-snatch of tumbleweed. Weightless. Slipping
through a crack of light, I cross the threshold
in a screech, as if all nesting owls have been released.
I am small in the sea, pushed around
by waves that care not for any grain of sand
or stuff that floats in old men’s heads.
Arms held wide and high, that reach and cling
like a child to a parent when things get rough,
when routines fail and muscles waste.
I hesitate, recoil, cower; skin so thin
these cold water blades could spill these guts
for waiting gulls and wash away this name.
I am caught like the sun, falling
and hoping to rise again, the horizon watched
from a base of arched feet, soft soles and toes
exposed to the hidden sharpness of shadows.
And though these whispered sea breezes,
with caresses would show the way,
for that bastard time waits not for me,
until I learn to surrender, immerse this body,
allow these legs to float and lay back this head,
could I ever take in the whole of the sky?
Even if you were not born yet
the matter from which you were made
is in this picture
and I cannot decide if this means
that nothing really matters or that
everything matters.
Sunday morning silence.
Self-imposed solitude
contemplating an unaccompanied cosmonaut.
Left in lunar orbit
to keep the systems running
while Armstrong and Aldrin are Moon-bound, Glory-bound
Collins loses all communication with the Earth
and takes a snapshot.
No earthly loneliness could match such isolation
and yet
sometimes I feel like the sole survivor of a mission that failed
and I never even got the chance to walk on the Moon.
The offices merge, and the
dinners and the nights out.
Even, embarrassingly, the aunts
and the children of friends.
But never the sunrises.
Each one mapped distinctly
across my veins
like a new and still-blossoming love.
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 