Signature

This is a rolling night: pushes up to car windows,

breathes on them, writes its name, writes mine. 

To sound night’s name is to know the lungsong

 

of wafting grocery bags—the clean bells 

of jellyfish contracting. In the river of a street, 

I play my legs like long white keys at the far ends 

of an octave. The black keys are bats, caping high,

each preying cry a note, a whole page of gnat notes 

a whole alphabet—notes like O and U and Y.

These drab street yellows are a chord. These phone

lines are ledger. There is a treble-clef tree. I am 

the rest; the fermata moon is holding, holding.

How to Say the Deer

By day a herd, but a river

by dark, a breath or clean shirt

 

drifting, and all we see is the night-spun

linen, the pale flick of sleeves.

 

At noon they are soft coats and tall

ears and tails, the dog-scent of salt and hide,

 

at night they are spindles and flax, eyes

like lake-silt, windy legs raining.

 

I know how darkness touches

us, makes new or ancient or wild.

 

 I left the biscuit of porchlight;

I dissolved in a crescent of sable

 

grasses, and does thrilled away,

a swanwing.

First Carnival

That day is dim as a coin: a tent

sweating earth salt and straw, the windy flight

of one man into the jute-ropey arms

of another, the elephants, pounding

the cramped parameter of a halo

with their Bible feet. Two clowns with stoplight

noses take the stage. One is wailing, one

is laughing but the water springs from both

their noses, enough to fill ten buckets

and the fat man’s tub. Why are you crying,

one clown sobs to the other, Why are you?

They stare. They wring their noses like the knobs

of locked drawers, and this is the funny thing

about grief: those drawers are always locked. 

The time I wasn’t invited to Tirzah’s Birthday Party

Left to my injury, I crucified

a toad, watched his face for any sign of pain.

I saw breathing and a gauze daisy blossom

in his eyes. Hurt when you’re hurt, dogs

know, and tigers, and any tornado. Pick a windstorm

stomping in the yard, knocking on a locked door—

who needs you guys, he uproots all the phlox,

hangs two foxes and a catfish from the spires

of a barbed wire fence.

 

 

 

 

Grumbling

when what we wanted was waived, it was war

we wished God eschewed with us,

not worked through us.

So plum lovers, puddle jumpers both

shot

a shell of sound.

Listen,

you can hear the ocean

a wonder, a whisper, the patience of pulse thunder

rumbling judgment, not yet

Not. yet.