Last night on their way upstairs, the neighbors came in
and sat at our table, and we could sense the hole
like a sudden cave inside her, the reason they were canceling
our dinner plans, and she mentioned funeral
but said nothing more, so we asked
about the local fish and what we might buy at the market
because we were still fairly new in town and could get away
with such ordinary questions, and our neighbor, shifting her weight
around the invisible swell, used her hands to pull her lips

What you will find, little girl, little boy
is that after the storm there is only
one path, and it leads to the mill
at the end of the winding river
that grinds out the fate of the world
You can hear its groaning gears
all your life without reading, anywhere,
about a wounded machine that is
swallowing the stars. But doesn’t
the sky look darker every night?
Isn’t there a small bear missing from
the heavens? A bull ? A great bird?
No one knows where the river begins
or why the mill is tireless, insatiable

There could not have been any other
Choices, lose what you mean or find

What you mean, mean what you find
Or mean what you lose. That is, most

Of us have witnessed in one way or
Another someone mistake unencumbered

Air for a plate-glass door, another
Shattering of the self and coming out clean

Among the shards. How we have come
Through so unscathed, even though we

Still carry our scathing with us. What
Kind of food do we need to feed the blood,

                “Every action longs for its opposite.”
                —William Matthews

Pythagoras and Plato create Antichthon: a world opposite ours.
The Antipodes walk with their feet in the air,

so we don’t fall off balance.

It’s a grim business. The blood always rushing to their heads,
never being able to pick up anything they drop.

No swimming in the boiling sea.
Always buying fancy shoes they don’t need.

Waiting for her for fifteen minutes, Mother, why does it take so long, all these minutes,
aren’t you ready yet, my seven-year-old life held up until she’s made herself presentable,
my life held back, unable to separate, a membrane containing me, yet of course this is my
life who else’s could it be, and at its end if it’s a slow end there will be one thing
imagined and perhaps one more thing, then perhaps a sensation as of warmth or cold, of
blockage or flow, a light, a sound, which doesn’t resolve into an image of anything and

Filmed on daylight savings after it snowed. When we usually built
things. I saw my mother under a different dark sky. “Mom,” I said,
“there is no action here.”

I ate the piece of hail she handed me. Can a poem behave like a
painkiller?

She said, “Be stupid to it.”

I almost understand. The film happens outside the film. I remember
because I had an injured neighbor who died that May and I found his
work boot lying in the street. This footage is from around that time.

*

she says:

an (in)articulated

waltz haunts

deep within his mid-
brain

in tongues

there is terrible light

***

he loves her

clavicle

her ankles

their mirroring

textures asymmetric

with a comma

***

she holds binoculars

***

his nerve 

cells 

already starved
when she notices the in

articulation−

his arm 
not swinging

now

***

their waltz

unsteady

reveals gestures’

depletion