Clear and blue.

If there is a heaven and

If the tender sky can in its

Weakness

Hold the deserving few

Then where must they stand so we know?

The audience of saints who resisted the

Wretchedness we share--

Was the encumbrance less than it is today?

Were women kept in chests

To honor the purity of the eyes!?

(Jesus, don't answer that.)

Such as it is.

A weight so forceful in the hands,

In a minute it will sink,

And everything I've tied to it

Will be drenched and

Will storm centuries of the deepest

Steel wealth.

Remember me,

Remember her,

Remember what we called centuries and

The Gods named

Embarrassment,

Polished--we did polish it.

Of warmest rain.

This dream is no ordinary dream.

When I reach out to touch you

I crawl to the pitch of warmest rain,

The familiar crown from the street lamp,

A storm grate overcome with swill

And music to fill all memory.

The ruse.

Language is wrecklessly close to nothing at all.

Its replacement with more careful inspection,

Love,

Divulges itself with grand spills to disorient

The speakers, hearers

Translators. Love:

Running from the chin

Cracking the teeth,

Melting the tongue as it jerks on the weight of

Peeking adventure.

Is

Unstoppable,

Or who would?

You get it?

Your home.

Give up a morning and root

For the seeds you've sewn.

Skewered by pillared shadows

And limited in the means of

being found

Those physical doses will doubtless have been

Strewn about you.

Fortune is a meticulous thing

You learn with stubbornly stubbed fingers.

Some of those mottled pockets in the ground

Are yours, with

Fresh shoots,

With your neglected likeness.

Of the hands.

You can learn from a town what you can learn

From the rock beneath it.

There in the infant features of a tilted glass catching the light

Blazes the infinitude that left the rock beneath it.

Stolen from each blade

And each color

Is a voice of choking

Order--

Disoriented by its direction--

As one to another it as a word--

Briefly animated as blazed the infinitude

That left the rock beneath it.

The river rises.

Carriers now familiar with the bridge
Cross again even as the rains leap the guardrails;

The river is confident, it grows up.
And on the dry cobbled grade below a
Scholar sleeps off a handful of strewn days.

The end of a conflict.

Now in the decadence of grass
The archway is split in half, each

Side vanishing in a shriveled
Cavalcade.

Who looked and read the epigram so
Chapped and lichen-pocked?

Could either have known that
The revenue of the sun lies
In movement--

That stone slows the foot?

Vital limitations.

Haste more than time
Mothers each new day.

How many thousand years
Of daylight and work
Must pass across our skin to learn

The vital limitations of the species--


We have no choice but to go on mercilessly.

The miracle.

And when they see it this one time
They will call it by its one name

As if that was the only word that was ever written down

The only word summoned when a woman kisses.

In a storm.

A wooden pin holds the mast in its place
Against the hail of adversity.

In the meeting of winds a storm makes details.
These waves are illuminated with silver nicks

And steam.

The boat itself will fold and reemerge
Sink, then rise.

Each dreamer copes thusly with a task so lowly as
Being borrowed by the ocean;

Each dreamer will sink, then rise.

Today.

A perfect breath of air is waiting,
And the land,

Perfect,

Will wait with its kindness.

The virgin.

Each pear grows til the moment it is picked.
Ripest rains pursue its froth-colored sugar,

And the Earth, patient, waits with
An upturned palm.

Voices till in the branches as
The young wobble and

Dream of their next climb, fall, fall again.

In violation of what, it's natural to wonder?
Encouraged, but
By what?

Engendered to bloom and rescue the
Hardest senses
Til the wrists ache from reaching and
Dreams assume that milky
Green.

In violation of what is this thing, exactly,
As the young play above with their understanding?

Here I am below them.