and my dear dog who used to fetch.

I wondered, at one point,

if I had in fact killed myself—

if death just meant spending

all your time with your past.

The more there is, the more loss there is—

true not only of the world, but of perceiving it,

even of the imagination sizzling on top of it.

I have a dark bruise on my body

where a tail would come.

If I put pure water in my mouth

and cough it out, it’s mud.

Enoch has written

We are made in His image

but God may have many images.

He may want even more.

Perhaps He is using my body

to remake His

into a kind of thinking dust.

This is, however, an abnegation

of my choice. I am here,

no voices in my ear,

no madness but the one of life—

Touching the Floor

TOUCHING THE FLOOR

I touch my palms to the floor

and granite bulls surge up my arms

and lock in my shoulders.

Water flecks on my back

and my head is shaved

by bladed cream.

But then my time in my body is up

and it’s time for my mind:

It seeks wisdom

and the bulls fall into a well,

their faces falling apart—

I want to know what their last words are

but their lips are fading into the purple.

I put my hands into the ground again

but bulls come only for the body

and never for the mind.

I used to want infinite time with my thoughts.

Now I’d prefer to give all my time

to a body that’s dying from cancer.

*

O Body, playmate of the kiln,

darkener of sky and water,

could you squeeze shut

the little mouths talking my hands out of my body?

Zyprexa, the Snow Pills

ZYPREXA, THE SNOW PILLS

have too many wounds to zip up,

brain becoming a suit of zippers,

soberly shutting.

Snow Angels

SNOW ANGELS

We call it snow

when the parts of God,

too small to bear, contest our bodies

for the possession of our smallest sensations.

The snow brings suffering to the only thing small enough

to have lived peaceably next to suffering.

The Hanging Gardens

THE HANGING GARDENS

A land and its peoples are often spoken of together.

This is a description of just a land

and not its peoples:

A bare tree here is not like

a bare tree elsewhere—

It does not have potential, nor is it dead.

It is a wrecked loom;

do not hang your wash on it.

I am offered tea at every place the paths meet.

The circle of tea is like a locked sun,

or a fish with a tail

so good at being a tail

it reaches its head again

and makes the head a tail,

until it is one round tail.

Tea, tea,

wise as the sea,

tell me how to be with child.

The tea instead offers

a steady stream of limbs.