from which to write about

spring snow on the forest floor.

8. My Lips Closed Over the World That Broke Through

I was a small seed, bare as a soul.

I often mistook my hands for hooks.

I sung high and thunderous and scared at the revival meetings.

I would look at the sky and think of a tin punch lantern.

In the evenings, one side of me would often get even with the other.

This is my life! cries the wild doll, and I’m the judge.

If you wake up in a conflagration of hunger, eat up the black fact of it.

9. Black Painting

The night always knows when to complete itself:

just before dawn.

The sun will never know its ambitious secrets.

Though left so long and so far from light in this wild place,

the night becomes strange. Its aesthetic satisfactions

may insufficiently repay

the wind blowing through

a little soul—

mortality a frontier in the arc of it,

waiting to see how we solved being alive.

O night! In this lunacy, we could be so happy together,

thinking about thinking about

the sun’s brightest provocations.

AT THE OTHER END OF A WIRE

When he called, there were 261 emotions

at play. I thought there were only wistfulness,

humiliation, and mere bitterness left, but lo,

I see now the brilliance in the numbers.

Emotions 75 and 78 made me happy just to know

they existed. I felt less alone, more impervious.

I was emboldened by the existence of 152.

Though, how was I supposed to accept 9, 14, and 179?

We deserved better, distress and indigence aside.

Something about 260 broke the spell inside me

and offered up a tiny shift: I opened my eyes in the fog

and tore off the surfaces of 261 and 4 with a great shout.

VOUS ET NUL AUTRE

I have hung our dwelling with enormous

nets, crackerjack feeler though you are.

But nets don’t help us in the awful

enormity of the emotion of thinking.

The electrifying interiors keep

turning their faces from the light.

/

The moon’s passionate disinterest.

Stage blood.

Contrails overhead.

The dynamic properties of will

elude us.

Feeling is clawing out of her hair.

/

Thinking through the feeling, yet

the body won’t comment on this event,

refuses to draw a moral from itself.

Won’t it at least reveal the

dramatic force of a last stand?

Is it just being fiercely economical:

a broken heart as dreamy suspension,

as glinting aporia. A lecture on the weather.

/

A boat as swan as burning nettles:

such feelings.

/

Instead of sweet thoughtlessness, I could

taste my mind churning.

It was a great relief that my thoughts

had taken over feeling about our sorrows.

I wanted to turn over all my wildness to them,

so that they could harbor it in English-language sounds.

/

A stunned heart uses up whole days.

You appeared crucial,

not only interesting.

Feelings escaping out from the

willful I, the one that wants always

to place its unthinkable petals on high branches.

/