May I

  Because   Because nobody tells us how to do it or can to loose the still sticky sinew we pinch into the print of our fingers its grip insisting a rhythmic kinship with the distant umbilical cut from us some seventy plus forevers ago its dust                      it’s dust as rises up the thermal pull of her departure and by some intimacy of design is aligned to the aquatic quality of her breath to manifest there until renovated to snow that as we walk toward our future alone of her     it falls on us our clavicle our exposed throat so subtle a touch as to make us part our lips so we can how long have we held it         breathe again

  held   “An Academy of silences” Diane Seuss said   and I was just before thinking about how so many relationships are carried on as though someone has just stepped on the detonation pin, & the long aftershock pause has stopped it all: the victims, intimates and random passersby.   The fragility of its nearly imperceptible sound, or, for those who didn’t hear it, the stock-still posture, the absolute awe of the flesh yet cleaved to its tendon & bone not yet cleaved from its tendon and bone.   Toe pin.   The lift of the heel, the perceptive listener, like a piano tuner at rush hour who can sift through so many so many notes on those slack wires . . . her hand goes up just as her face is drained & everything is quiet.   This my friends is the true test of strength, the caution of the tipped   bomb, the unlifted weight, the people feeling their face their ribs their crotches to to...

  toward meeting shaker village canterbury, nh Ensoulment   Slice of ice or             like a pie’s pastry                         dough lining the glass                                     plate.   Layer,                                                 layer the folding,                    ...

  How   the only way to see the wind is to witness what objects to it—what it can or cannot say. Though   isn’t this all in the eye of the observer: it’s yes, it’s no, it’s some degree of maybe.  Watch   the shredded ends  of each prayer flag be lifted be sifted be skittered to the plane edge of places to the rising   foundation                         of places to be either struck there by other debris rising and falling in this wind               leaf sideways pasted             sheet flip knitting   always makes me think it’s a creature being chased.  mouse.  mole.  ground squirrel.  something bound to be   small.   ...

  Misericordia    Gates of Mercy, stop breaking down.                                       Charles Wright                                     ARS POETICA III   The visible, vulnerable—a season & a season & halfway into a season.   Of making leaves.   Of making.   Leaves.   When the rain is finished falling, & the wind   that catches all that has been falling in it and has been moved on, when the field seems still as it's ever been   from this distance.   The small copse of white pine.   & a  ways off: the becoming bare sugar...

  ginkgo After Han Kang’s We Do Not Part     When do you think they turned to stone? The moment they looked back?   Or do you think it took a little more time?                         Han Kang                         We Do Not Part for Katie L.   They’ve gone to chalk again, the rocks. The color I mean.   All summer they were dun dust & mud, unearthed as they were   from their slumber.   A broke open exhumation.   Cold dark, I think I see, I want to see a spark come up when it hits another – I   hurl them the way I was taught to hurl medicine balls, from the gut to the gut.   The way it is caught, the way   it takes, because of the weight, the breath that’s...