The concrete keeps everything
in place, except the wind,
the bums,
you.
I walked by the market,
40 centigrade, still the picture
of heat on your January breath,
water being
light.
I pulled in, caught in
the ropes of rain on the driveway
at the edge of
an island, I catch the earth
caving in
again.
I pray that in the morning
worms will have made it through,
drowned the sidewalks,
knowing that there were only
moments in which
to breathe.
When I try to replace you
with another thought,
you say to me,
I could try being
that small fox you saw this morning,
hurtling from the woods.
Then, when I notice,
through the gravel smoke,
that you’ve spotted me again,
I’d ricochet back
into the forest
of your mind.
I’m not one who will say,
“This is the name of the flower,”
so the petals flocking up from the river
behind the trees are only a beauty
I cannot name (like, of course,
the other beauties).
Wonder names it though,
hectic shadows
at the intersection of Wyndham and Finch,
shifting between their lives
of pink and white.
They trick me into, then out of
this Spring of existence, as if it might be,
just for this moment,
a feather struggling to carry
its weight of light.
These lines I wrote you
And rewrote you
Constant ending
On a far line
Of landscape
I cannot end
Can only drive
This muteness
that lipreads you
on the dumb cuneiform
of memory
That invisible jet
somewhere
passing
at the speed of sound,
its past tense
gone
before
its gone again.
I wish there were
a saviour
to forsake me
for this feeble
prayer.
But even God
is known for
his love
of words
that must not
be said.
I wish I were deaf.
Not hear the silence
that says,
Paul, forget me.
And
I
wish
I
could forget
my name,
who
I was.
And the muscles of wind
loosening everything,
though I knew you when the sun stuck
to all of it,
and light, having traveled 96 million miles,
brought your face close. Still,
you shivered at night.
You were so thin then.
I feel the sunlight here and there today; I hold on
to what is leaving.
I try to forget how things change.
I try to remember the birds that summer
that somehow to make it it back.
Wild birds, this morning,
the shapes of fists
on the steering wheel, steal up
from the Nith
and crisscross closely
my speeding car.
It seems the heart must
bear the winter,
then drift up from a river
before the wild bird
will take to the wind.
You’re in the bathroom emptying my semen
from your body. On the bed, I lay stripped,
my cock, wormed in light, burrowing
into the tangle of other fractures, the veins that orbit back
into darkness.
I stare up into the ceiling; below,
it imitates a fish, pulsing to breathe an air it cannot breathe.
It cowers between my legs; blood exiles
to the brain, as if blood is the ejaculate
of this second, outer heart. All my life,
I have been giving birth to this animal between my life,
but the world is only deep
and immense for a time; your legs around me,
like quotes, fit only briefly,
exclaiming upwards: we are falling,
sinking into the shallowness of the night air,
and into the sheets of our separate dreams,
fading, cum stuck to our flesh, like weak glue,
like the reflections of little clouds on the ocean.
(Rewrite)
You’re in the bathroom emptying my semen
from your body. On the bed, I lay stripped,
my cock, wormed in light, burrowing
into the other fractures of mine.
I stare up into the ceiling; below,
it imitates a fish, pulsing to breathe an air it cannot breathe.
It cowers between my legs; blood exiles
to the brain, as if blood is the cum pumped
from the other heart. All my life,
I have been giving birth to this animal between my life,
but the world is only deep
and immense for a time; your legs around me,
like quotes, fit only briefly,
exclaiming upwards: we are falling,
sinking into the shallowness of the night air,
and into the sheets of our separate dreams,
fading, but glued to our flesh,
like the reflections of little clouds on the ocean.
