details under erasure

[ details under erasure ]

When first I noticed the ridges in my hands
abraded by my appetite for motion, I was reading a book
I won't read again. There's a surprise in all flesh
which makes me feel lonely, which brings to mind
it will be impossible to hold a conversation
with a psychic. There is not enough faith
she'd explain, when skin's smooth as glass
when the glass alone seems less symbolic
than our belief that proximity's never
the measure of mystery. She'd whisper not
to worry as the rivers
of my palm do. I awoke with a sense
of what The Gulf of Mexico
might taste like. The City of Salt.
When I am afraid of the pattern
of green fields and brown fields
it's my way of imagining my hands
merely want to be loved.
To be loved without blemish
of some vestigial map. My life
line protects me from knives. Of
the possibility my body
that night as it arched
over a bridge might be
smeared across crag, rather the dare
of gravity. Sharp blades of
crabgrass. I woke to the hum
of my wife's scripted breath.
Between the spaces usually bad things
happen. I think prayer is how hands mourn.
To veil the boredom of living my left hand lay
open. Open like an eyen not yet closed of the dead
* * * * *

a small pleasure of birds, (preghiera serale)

[ a small pleasure of birds, (preghiera serale) ]

I'm suddenly older
I mean, of course, how wily silence and nothing else
has happened. Like everyone else, I have only a first
few scattered thoughts out there in front of me
so starkly, wanting, to soften beyond the heart's
invisible, never obvious, reaches. I think of bedsheets
not quite warm, I think tables full of dirty dishes,
I think my legs are tree trunks sunk in grass
each time my heart is broken. Behind the grocery store
there's a mountain of bruised peaches. Slovenly present
with evening upon it. Bones, I feel my bones. You said
I have vanished under fingers, sublimated, and I've lost
a scene set in brooklyn, hours ago, when I fell asleep
and started to dream. There were distant sirens, drifting
like leaves through the streets I don't know the names of.
Suitably I might have asked you for a glass of water. You'd say,
the future of rain is river. But tonight the rivers are black.
I think entrapment comes up as a metaphor. We've never met.
Still, there is a prayer, like the night, it whispers
through the poplars, it is the color of my throat:
we love & we love & we love & we love & we love
but it turns out there’s nothing much to say
or translate into italian at the end.
* * * * *