prayers of many summers come

[ prayers of many summers to come ]

Summer is insensitive but mother-close, lying in my bed all this time, I imagine, lying in a strange geometry, her tongue coaxing my nipple. If the floorboards are filled with silted smoke and cooling ash. Undoubtedly Summer, you are intimately beyond dust, another sort of ageless flower. Summer lies on the ground and pretends to be hammered silk, of being present at my parent's wedding. At sunset we would find her lifting a bucket of water, for instance, as the other room fills with commotion, and a sense of her own breath, as Summer fills the washing machine with the warm surface, of sorrow, far away in the heavens. She gasps at the weeping willows, shaped like family. Thus in the shade, resting too quietly: whipped clouds crawl near my shoulder blades, work clothes draped over hamper edges, the air within her lungs, indelible as a name. My breath becomes a blowfish. I imagine my beard flowering green with white leaves and assume it will be coming home. I may be in parallel summer. The surgeon notices Summer is ink-brushed with ochre and fragments of small-maple. Her sister, Mary, sobs away from the kitchen and spreads indecently under the inconsolable carob tree. The sound of a train surprises me. Summer remembers seeing boxcars, unhurried, crossing a bridge of feathers, under the northern sky, where people don't die. My eyelids are makeshift suitcases. We can mourn right here. But Summer imagines that her foliage will not be plucked from bloodied mouths, her secret blouse slowly unbuttoned. Peeking my head from a barrel I watch the bright fruit coffin under the walnut tree. I imagine my grave into a nocturama. From our driveway at dusk, I reach for her thigh studded with fireflies. And then there was the dream of being present in our driveway at dusk: Summer slips into bed beside me. A gust from my belly, a perfume of just mowed grass, probing the undiscovered portals under lush moss over nothing. A condom trail from family portraits tilts toward our quilt. I'm divorcing the same moment it happens. As moonlight arcs overhead, a pitch of cardinals tickles the hair on my legs. In late summer, her dark fur is combed into a series of doves. What I remember most about Summer was our continual desire to love in the gaining darkness, soliloquies the late leaves of cherry trees lost in a valley, a curious need for our endlessness. I bring in the groceries, fold the wet towels. What now? No one had swept the doorway, and from the cat's white meowing, I want to give her milk.
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* Author's note: The poem paraphrases Randall Williams' poem "Star City: Winter," in Octopus magazine

An Account of Kissing

[ An Account of Kissing ]

I stood on the shore facing her pale,
And senselessly, she turned from me,
Was turned from me, and turned to salt;

And yet it happened in the imagination
Where we stood together, where I dissolved
Into a cloud. I held the finger, hers,

To touch the sky. Pointing until light enough.
We spoke in a language of no tongue
On earth. The shore, ours, is not a story.

I breathed terra and driftwood
And with horrible flagellum
I scourged my bare legs on ox-hide.

"Et nos ergo manum ferulae subduximus"
"The calm globe of Morning is upon us"
"Your limbs are twisted olive branches"

I listened, years before I knew you,
To the inamoratam, and yet it happened
In the nettles, it happened till I reddened

All the more. And I believed you.
And I stood on the shore facing you,
Hours upon hours, until the flowers,

Wild as wohnt, wilted into rainwhisps,
Pouring words upon us like pearls
And the grateful sky's attribution

Knows God's wrath. I know about mourning.
In the end flush everything red parted;
We spent passing a night over a humid bed

Between two lips called Small Pleasure.

You woke me at dawn, holding my living face,
Where I still live. And yet it happens
In the imagination, as many others
Behind us had drowned.
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* poem quotes or paraphrases, in part, from Joshua Cohen's prose, "An Account of the Saltscape, in Three Parts."