peels on the way, and there were lilies with three
petals and buttercups five and cosmos eight

and perhaps always in tandem there’s the certain
whirlpool, swirling on towards little oblivion.

IF I'VE EVER MADE SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL

i.
it wasn’t on purpose. when the boy swears god
loves me i think i have not even met the guy
but sure, i’d like to, so this is how i’ll spend
the impossible day, captive in a beater driving
down west market as he says look at all of this
gestures to a strip mall and tel me you don’t
believe in a creator

ii.
consider superglue. unintended headway penicillin
dynamite coca-cola champagne! wilhelm channels
a mystery ray and calls it x, not divine. a sparkling
current propels atom through atom, green disaster
blaze which deems the flesh extraneous, and the light
understands now. the broken particles, imagined,
dominated, even the intimacy too close as ghosts
of orderly black appear revealing what before
we’d had to bleed to know. sorry, sorry, what
had he been trying to do, again

iii.
i shouldn’t have been so hard on the strip mall. what
am i asking of it? it’s the point, anyway, that there’s sin
and miracle nothing else, and hey, i clock a robin folding
branches into the o’s of the sign on goodwill, where inside
someone buys a stranger’s blood-red confession
dress. i want the boy to define accident. then mistake.
for fun he’d rally creation and discovery, but look, i’d say,
don’t you feel it, when the sun casts shadows across
the ugliest parts of you, the senselessness, the stumbling,
our tipsy sleepwalk into ourselves, in the same instant
formed and found, and i blink the wet eyes that happen
to bore down to the marrow, looking for god, and discover
two-hundred off-white flecks of rubble, of what the earth
built with what was left of heaven.

ENOUGH

no maybe the ugliest hours shouldn’t host
miracles but still they go on hosting for example
this all happened while i was fumbling around

in the unnatural morning like a nocturnal
animal and you don’t have to believe me
i wouldn’t believe me but on the way home

the seagulls were laughing like kids

and i tipped my head to the day-moon which hung
translucent with a projection’s non-reality against
a sky so blue my teeth chattered and when i lay

face down beside the brook i swore
the earth flexed against my belly a degree
of a degree of a degree of a degree of a

crucial degree

THE ETERNITY WE SHARE

act as though you’ve just been granted immortality
and i’ll mirror the buzz. admit it, that’s what it’s like,
on golden-fluke mornings, or two glasses in, or dodging
the fidgety mayflies on erie, the day boiling fierce
in every direction. to be happy, sometimes, feels like
quitting. other times, only chemical, like when you brush
my chest so gently i assume you’re looking for a hair-thin
seam, or which rough spine to tug and send the whole wall
spinning in the direction of the hidden things—suddenly
there’s my heart, as bloody and heady as yours.
right now, we’re still. chins tilted towards the trace
of distant pinpricks sewn in orange, gulls as antishadows;
concurrent focus, as if into the eyes of something bigger.
as if we are the eyes. i decide joy to be the natural state
of the cosmos, the return to it some kind of entropic
fate. my skin practically puckers. each taste bud, a name.
this is so beautiful and there’s nothing i can do about it.
you are so beautiful and—understand, every night
the collective us sees seven billion sunsets. have you
even checked? really, really looked? say earth. know
the experience of saying it, how the letters together
behave like a cricket’s purr, earth, that honeyed thrum,
earth, so easy to breathe, earth, earth, earth. i don’t need
you to meet the rapt stagger. i don’t even need you
to remember. just know, now—seven billion sunsets
and here’s me, convinced we’re seeing the same one.