Letters in Winter

will you look at me and feel good

     I’m so tired of whatever 
     this is; a quantum empathy
     discovering itself empty,

     that the fantasy hurts, in fact,
     does it seem inevitable yet
     to you too, what makes a future

     viable, or inviolable. was the gallery
     still lit in the off-hours, 
     and did you bother to check.

you don’t understand: I was born under an idiot planet,
     I have to be allowed to break my own heart, and prise
          away its hemispheres, an unripe fruit, the bitter magnet
               kernel, the velvet ruined with scratching

there, look, is a bird’s muting
level as a psalm

How to be both

only brilliance could manage it:     the live
     and let live, the love them
     and the leave them:     let me,
picking the wound from the steady bone

earth is a cool place, with    forestlike frosted grain
     a tissue that loves its own thought

     back in the kingdom of dirt, where sex
was the origin of noise     at the interlimb
     between sleeping and fucking,     or drawing me back-
first into the arms of an error

          who could be critical –
               the young people
                    who take love seriously

          ten times fairer than an arrow / 
                                               strange as it deserves

Without departing

move the oak under the paint;
                                                   the bright sky has a grain
                                              that tears pigment
                                         and the overpass
                                    skirts the garden 
of the dead. a mezzotint could
     shift there, with its gusts and sunbursts
          lining provisions towards absence. 

                                    later I found where it started,
a child’s ring and a rawish diamond, which cried
this spark will grow. for what?
     a carnal, cloud-textured dream

I love the sea-inflected city: the way it handles
projection, in the Rorschach of noise,
and count its four points: still flame
above a vertical red spell; budded
deep in a cross; or bound
in glass; the stars move 
dumbly to the apex.

and at night in my bed there’s a sound that won’t let you sleep
and you think it’s the world

Low North

like little teardrops weren’t they?,
prefiguring the wave, before the skulk and bolt through tissue
and follows      the salt-coat       
stitched in line. If there is a grace in distance, or deep vent
in knowledge, I am signing off     however
                                                                       the future starts
or is foreseen. And wish away my cool appraising eyes for nothing,
to no end. 
                 After where the Dutch light likes my face,      and the risk between the candle,

outside the locked gate of a private hope,      parked in thought,      it makes an edit
for the unstilled voice. 

                                    Doesn’t it matter to know? it’s
                                                                                     November, I
                                                                                     love you, say
missing anyone is basically made up of imagination,
only     even the radiant pain,
even the leaded windows.     There, 
                                                             why can the time not see the moon? 

Listen: how steadily a tune becomes a cry,
which then eclipses and whereby holds.