Ancient in my asking, blue truths circumnavigate the dairy state.
Maybe I am dumb enough to sing.
As a long fall descends upon the continent, a new emergency
erupts within the taught interiors
of white men. Allow me to confess.
Every time I watch a blue jay peck apart an egg
only half of who I am
disintegrates. Maybe the thin veneer of reason
isn’t the firm stone ground
it used to stand upon. I am filled with questions
for the dead. Here, among the living and the sound
of living lungs, how is it local birds
do not descend in flame
each time their callnotes vanish
in the city’s thickness? Is there
forgiveness? Are the two dark rocks I threw
into the river, demanding violence
to the president, worth going in to save?
Just yesterday, I watched my lawn turn brilliant
within a silver arc of water slanting upward
from a plastic Walmart sprinkler. An old tune echoed
from a speaker tethered to the internet.
I called my mother and I told her that I loved her.
A rainbow etched itself in air.
Maybe, when I’m older, I’ll stop imagining
the policemen all have names
and walk alone for once into the shuddering despair
of the second half of my existence.
I no longer check my bank account.
Truth is, I know I’ll never leave the incoherent structure
of my history, never draw my form
around my form in chalk, or step beyond the incandescent limits
of a language. In my left hand, blue shells
turn to shitty narratives. This sky is not the sky I learned about in song
Beyond the song it’s not
resistance anymore the work / an axis thus subtracted
xenophobic weight, a garden
now a grave in both your hands / that shadow
—
tiresome without a record, sir it isn’t beautiful
at all the mind as it occurs
could be a place and I believed you / ruin
—
thus supplanted effigy, or Eros like
I want the many
languages as though the whole
the world becomes
when praying hard it isn’t
there as landscape
pissed upon in imagery / or rain
—
etched in plains of grass the lung a zero closing
pantheons of horses fuck
in waves converging instruments a place remembers
the city woke you up
—
formed to fit the lake’s interior
as thing the rain
as reciprocity the street
pretends its houses
like abuse is not to permanence / that path is not
to hills there isn’t
such a thing
—
impossible transparency / the eye a dispatch opening
—
rather melancholically the world turns back / into its edges
ion / agonies
of light
the pupil’s infinite regress
through green
to disappear
the work of weeping / blue
—
there it is
I see it
it / that we as well
are here
are not enough against
or terrored through the maples disappear / in creases
recollected merely strange
in poetry like how a history distends
within a garden
settled there in the / effect
—
like capital against
the foothills, flaming / an angel disarrayed
for now the forms of
houses moor
—
touch your finger to the radius / my love as crypt believing zones of light and hollow
now / a dank cacophony
of shepherds interrupt the varied radicals of blue
arcadia the fields are getting off
—
a mouth is not a wilderness
I’m listening
—
desire is to chrome and absolute the languages
exist as silver
extending past in opposites a miracle that anything is here
at all / that any
thing is un–
corrected, existing
there the center bathed in paint
a burning sword extends in light
of capital / it could be said
and has been / if one has learned to writhe within
the lull of this catastrophe, I promise
In the middle of September, after everything we loved
had ended, the day remained
a sound pronounced
among emergencies. It was almost
beautiful. A scrawl of voices shook
an opposition through the trees and I believed them.
Do you remember me, the way my mouth
succumbed to its announcement,
its presence in the alphabet an actual atonement.
Among the black metallic structure
of a language, imperfect in the present tense, I called to you
across the open grove of meaning
and I listened. Terror-struck and tethered
to each other, we lived and breathed
and were surrounded by our speaking.
The leaves descended
like the inconsistent weather of the law. Our voices carried them.
Ungovernable, the sun, the sun, the sun