The answer without the equation
The wind does not choke
On the earth’s thirst
My mouth tastes like stomach
Tongue dry as a bee on a pin
It’s not all yours, this
None of it is
Author Archive for Naomi
Lifting his head
To taste the dark–
Multifoliate.
The rose is shrunken
Inward on the stem.
The grass is wet.
Over and over
I tell myself:
Selfishness is
The first great sin.
Fingers laced and locked
Like the teeth of a cat
She stares at the door.
Hour by hour
In the blind dark
The opossum hangs
From the dogwood.
A proliferance of joints
Clicking like clock gears
Spinning in slow motion,
Fast as a cat.
An assemblage of legs
Ending in pinpricks
Or snowflakes.
Beneath the flat rock, a nest
Of dust
Bugs,
Hairs,
Small rocks.
My hair and your hands, moving
almost in time. Hair flows like
daylight through a crack in the wall.
And your hands are—-angrily
Hands do not flow but they try to.
They want to gracefully maneuver
Through heaviness, but are heavy
Themselves. Hardened hearts
Flicker like small lights in a child’s
toy spaceship, that navigates the
Depthless skies alone.
Sun
The sun orange in a yellow
Orange sky, the sky
Swelling and fading to the light.
The faceless day
Resists time. . Time as it exists
In space, motionless and pale
Against blue bones, cold
In unyielding flesh, the softness
Almost shivers. The coy spring
deceives and retreats well into April.
It is late May. What should be gone
Lingers like one lost. I am leading
No one through the desert, though
I cry like Jesus Christ, I ache
Like Moses, and I sigh
Like water.
My feet are not there
and my ankles are lonely,
cut off at the joints, the fine threads
dangling uselessly, flicking
The tops of trees, if there
were trees to flick
birds into the sky
(they do not fly themselves)
They are a lonely shape
in vain. They must be pushed
from the nest to fall on their faces.
But we all have the same face.
It is blue and it is cold. It is
the night face at the window.
And it is the same face inside
and looking out.
I am sick in the mornings;
A time of waking. Timid morning sounds,
The birds in the lower branches; the shadowy violence
Of squirrels–they bark down the young trees.
They scatter at once when silence breaks sound,
And the branches are wraiths to the rising light,
Waving shadows on the rooms already dim.
When what is in me is reduced to lighting,
I can go only backwards, past dawn—
To where grey shapes are moving on a screen,
Or—I slept imageless last night.
Glistened;
The light on the ice on the water.
We spoke too loud.
Cars muffling other sounds, to irritate:
The heaviness of a false silence.
Sometimes above (on) waterways, ways which cross
And then divide—to things indivisible. I
weigh the universe in these pieces.
Light shattered. Dark, solid river–solemn.
A pale, dreamt shape, my shapeless hands,
Cutting the air. Through distant air.
A low swooping bird, skimming the water.
Together, we don’t attract or repel.
What is weakest, what sinks to matter, to flesh
(but deeper than skin) bone close.
And the closeness of bone leaves me lost.
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