open Archives

one response

to the question of how one is being

Now i riverbed, now ocean &
either way am disinclined to point,
tending to erode those points
aimed to find me taking
this skin shirt out for air.

i learn to dress in layers for those
places where everyone seems
eager to use their ready points
& these only make me bleed so
now i am back to being current
again to answer that question
re: the I that I seem, being @
the end of am. I can only say:
I am currently.

Maybe you know this way
& why we never lack for
company, streaming as we
do through here, hearing
communions all day long.

secret lives with birds

on openings

now you see me now i fly
what you cannot think
i dream of a constant
beginning
will be your life
in broken records
in babies’ mouths
in water i can’t
even we say
again taking
turns online
& laughing with
the relief of it if you
are what i cannot
think then be here
o god
for the life of me
i just–––

Inspired by the final line in Cal Bedient’s poem “Clouds of Willing Seen in the Bird Day”: “What you cannot think will be your life.“

Irrational Wish

For an opening

To want the eye
that sees where
I cannot enter
to blink from
this blind
impossibility.

What Opens

Before the after.

After the children had gone to live among the missing, after the pirates searched and left the land of broken light, our ghosts, these former vessels were everywhere.

And now. The screens rotate between sales events. First furniture, then war.

Idle hands, moving gaze. Downhill crossing grid: stucco, asphalt, concrete, sidewalk, yard. Repeat under shadow of freeway, up southern peaks. Back over yard, clotheslines, sheets into the harsh of late morning.

Find water, find ice, find the birds with your ears. Try again. They’ve gone silent. Find freeway on three sides a sudden soft hush and now a child’s laugh. Look and see her.

Barefoot and away, threading steps between oak and sage, eucalyptus, orange. Her pause in the clearing to enact the opening of stem into bud stretching petals to hills spinning. While stray cats watch, a horse looks on,

and you––