to feel the carpet’s texture, the floor’s vibrations

in decibels below the threshold of human hearing,

a No Speaking Zone, a place for wavelengths

of visible light, tonal harmonics reconciling

the Precambrian structures of the brain,

oscillating through the millennia to converse

with our bipedal awkward face-to-face

making of love, which is all she and I

can think of now, the unified theory

of color conjoined with sound,

and she squeezes my hand tight in her own

under the wire-hung letters of language,

which rotate above us in a perfectly

destroyed state, the letter C, the letter S,

each letter stretched, bent a little out of plane,

as if the invisible paper of language had been

peeled away so that now they drift

over us, freed from the word chair or staircase,

vibrations of sound gently lifting the alphabet

and lowering it the way a breeze might lift

the tips of her hair, my fingers guiding

the zipper in its channel, tooth by tooth,

the way it did last night, in the park, long after

closing time when the sprinklers switched on

and we didn’t stop – the killdeer singing, a siren

somewhere off in the distance, the sun itself

held at bay by the horizon, just long enough

to divot the soft lawn with her kneecaps

pressing down, shifting to the rocking of hips,

my own back given the imprint of earth

authored by the grass in its green vernacular,

muscles lifting, my thumbs at the iliac crest,

the smooth curve of her breast, the streetlamps

tapered like candles to backlight her silhouette

as we kissed the small quick fires from each other’s

mouths, cold water falling in a graceful arc

from the sprinkler heads positioned around us,

her hair matted and tangling with it –

this is what I’m thinking about in the museum,

the skeletons of art hung around us, petrified,

staring through the hard lenses of framing and oil,

staring at us from their fossilised stations

in the past, in wonder, marveling at

these two lovers, here, each of us

fully given to the inexorable process

of death, and yet, here we are

walking among them – alive.

The One Square Inch Project

Deep in the Olympic National Park, where black trumpet mushrooms

rise from the deadfall and leaf rot, I follow the footpath

leading to silence.

It is a type of medicine by landscape,

this forgetting of my life – yesterday’s drive up from Fresno,

the auburn leaves of mountain ash, variations of maple,

aspens in gold and rust and creamy yellows – all given to memory,

hushed by the green work of water; moss, vines, forest canopy.

An owl shakes the morning frost from its feathers.

Roosevelt Elk work their way through the pines up the slope.

Water, dripping from the leaves. Water, in tiny rivulets.

There is a small red stone placed exactly on the spot

where silence grows. It is a gift. It was given by the Elder

of the Quileute Tribe, David Four Lines, and I will not disturb it.