A Little Something Something

While crossing the Grand Canyon, I find myself wondering:
how many times can you tongue a word
before it begins to unbraid; yields to
splinter into your denim like wicker?

I will never be a whistler, ever-haunted
by some lingering something
a physicality that clings to my clothing, like cigarette air
or goo-sappy needles from blue spruce
on the couch in late January.

This condition is grave–
the chasm between us so mindful of its
own definite shape;

mine is a slow something that spreads
like the pooling of blood on a flat surface, deep and
seeping over time And yours
hungry; deviant as a stream in winter
fleet-full, feverish and darting just
beyond the surface,

barely contained by your own skin.

Tell Me About Yourself

I worry more and more now,
I am forgetting where we hid the buttons

I used to make lists to keep my brain from roving
hungry nomad roving
like buffalo

people keep on talking to hear themselves
selling it to eachother like fables,
a succession of grandiose recitals with a ____ that never comes
I like to stick my favorites everywhere like chewing gum;
my little exercise in feudalism

we become different and I cannot keep,
telling stories like heart rhythms like flash cards
I already know I am bad at geography

I go on like an echo how I am tired of asking for

Making one more request-
forget your face is a map and come to bed.

Collect These

A constant cycle of remembering and
un-remembering. Creation as a way of forming
new umbilical chords to once acknowledged truths.

Something I learned the year we lived together,
a day when the blocks were long with summer
and our destination loomed closely ahead.
The Ginkgo's had not yet begun to turn and I could have
found anything to be beautiful.

The yellow house was never about you or about anything.

I am afraid when I first realize
where something has come from and am reminded
that invention is only a clever game the brain plays
in hopes of convincing the body that
there can ever be a beginning and an end.

Swallowed in at the mercy of sudden triggers,
and then like nesting dolls folding in on themselves
indiscernibly and in unpredicted heart thumps.

Deer Spotting

I have been dreaming this whole time
or at least
some days I wake up and look around only
to find that I don’t remember arriving here.

Photographs are never accurate are they
moments becoming tangible becoming
something all to themselves.

Moments are never singular when they are happening.

You look like somebody I have not yet met.
When we hold hands I can taste
you through my finger tips and still
one day I may forget
exactly how your face falls.

This will not make you less of you and
I'd like to say that I won't save the pictures
or your voice recordings.

These only help me to pretend
that there is some way of keeping although

the most important parts dissipate
like droplets of color in water
long before you've recorded the ripples.

Of Fleeting Affairs with the Color Purple

In your pictures the forests changed into
green and yellow shapes, construed and blurred,
though I do not remember them that way.
How incorrect a vision becomes in retrospect
and yet we still wait sometimes for re-existence,
like tensed deer with prayers flung
silently into the air.

I have always been drawn to trees, but
these on the other hand, were not tall
at all reaching up with their deeply
knuckled branches towards the sky and the pigeons
who circled like sequins on string.

I insist on convincing you because I’d
like to imagine that we are not so different.
Listen:

I am only asking to steal back the bits
of loosed skin that have been shed
for the corners of rooms; to return home
all the empty mason jars in our kitchen.

A Craving

The treasure chest in the basement belongs to no one;
why do we keep such things
packratted into our corners, unlocked and empty.

People here claim nothing, big and small alike
words bob in the air suspended only by breath,
the great disappointment of youth
I am also guilty of.

Action: to lugclunk it up to my bedroom and
fill it with possessions: the pages of good books, borrowed
clothing snipped to bits like with shoe box art, or
to nestle into it like a cat in search of warmth,
who slinks in through the tunnels and crooks
formed by comforter when
a human body rolls over in bed.

What draws the sense to space yet leaves
the body craving comfort.

When I wake in the mornings,
gold eye slits blink from within the sheets.

Reminders on an Alien Terrain

An abundance of yellow for grass
if I were to assemble the backdrop:
an amassing of birds
like black and white
cookies with superfluous tails
collected on fence posts; not crows.
We find bricks and trees coexisting everywhere.
The familiar and unfamiliar
twining I am reassured
and imagine the river
is a slab of green marble between stone slopes.

Time inflicts on pigment; and
that which persists is not pertinent.
Desperation the cause of all that thalo paint—
Stop worrying,
what lasts will last.
Well, the museum was just a museum and

we prod the mountain like foreign thumbs.
Again and again, function performs.