Your eye claws tear my hand because
I reach to touch what you are seeing—

from the skin my fluid senses
in your hands a way of reading.
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At the core of moisture, bell-weather
blinking in the eye, the only lead for now,

sky-offering to your steps, though the walls
of your house can bury you very quickly—

meeting half-way, openly hidden,
air currents feeling for sinews, stone hives—

and though the space is limited,
within the night is not.
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And in time after time off the scale—
obliquely—after all in spite of hazards

that might waste the opportunity,
obliviously as that—as I think back,

from here a whisper lightly handed
off, off-handed, the accompanist,

familiar in this way, slips down
your stairs to climb up to your room.

To think that this will be whatever
in attendance, sequencing inevitably

as chance, as sequined, as
performed, as perfume.


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Wishes that you come by,
timed to the verticals of a longer

way around to get here where this is— naturally—
your hour, unintentionally at least, more interstitial

please, no fault—injustice all around you but your
latitudes as well, my love, while I am sleeping, you

are wandering in—a fissure in the tissue—up the devil’s
thigh. Nowhere gets so far now for as long as this, with

your permission, in the interval we slip through,
finding how without inside the outside lets this in.

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And if they joined us kindly—however the diminished water
works the transit, moment wavering, the dimmed lightning of our

juncture at two pauses—hand-slights for mouth-organs—lips
wide while a red sea cuts the middle, drowns too soon the loves

and hates in our extravagance, bleeding if you think that way of oceans
when you come to think of waters—though alluring, pleasing—wandering

from Egypt, swallowing our wonder…Your fingers are like small birds
feeding, our tongues mothered to the world’s content—the female articles

come first, the male ones straggle, eased inside but urged
without, sea-wet, the least flycatcher poised for darkness.