I stop on a hill on the beat of August where we were young
I bring drinks like the laughing teeth of Tu Fu’s
girls on horseback whose hair is perfumed
pennants of a single mourning

branded on a ceaseless sky I see the soul
may have no end in space;
weathers transmuted in our blood & our blood’s weathers
pollen all back-lit, silent, streaming, stars

crying quietly in a blacked-out room.
There are deserts around the mountains, evergreens on top,
interspersed with clouds.

We will embrace & eat together, again,
find our amplification & focus
in cellos & lilies waltzing on walls.

In a blur like metal whose singed design sinks it

I recall a dragonfly’s rasping honeycombs half knocked-out,
the collapsed ashen bough swathed in dusty filaments
braining itself on the parking garage’s long fluorescence—
& I look up into an x-ray of a profusion of escapes,
black star in the snow
whose irregular arteries
salute a singular devotion

hands whose few small windows still, charred, disintegrate

I hold up a cardboard box I’m carrying to the trash & immediately
it alights—
                    then I could let it go out under the open night.

The burnt frame of a hunter swoops to the sun’s sunk paradigm, outline
who searches inks of dawn for a horizon. The sun
will be his brother, flesh, & he will become a silver garland on the sea-air.
Gold star over brown hair, who, tanned, sees hailstorms.

I think of the bright dollops of saffron sea-oats twisting in the strand of the
Atlantic for no good reason, except it was where I was born, & the frosty unraveling
of Loggerheads birthing the papery lights
of our latest summer.