Our Aria

I

If the ear is the shadow of the voice
We loom on emerald
Bossanovas of forearms
We do not die in vain
We stroke
The slow outdoor dysphoria
Of hawthorn
In the infinite queue of lilacs
We say things
They hurt us
We say
I love you
We say we need things
We see things and
We want them
In blue tenses of rain
A drugstore epiphany
In the mirror
Like a bicep
In the mirror
But we are the mutts of memory
Collateral to
The wrestler’s muscular coda, or
The taste of an eye for an eye in the rain

II

Skyclad
In the chronic striptease of kouroi
This
Is called a pilgrimage
Intravenous
Fuschia daylight
So heaven is a bird bespoken
To a lake
As it breaks into ephemera
In a penultimate installment
Of white moss
Dissolving slowly in the mouth
Sweeter than silk
Laundered in the language
Of velour
Like how thunderclouds
Cast shadows
On the upper thigh
Of vertigo
It can be this way forever
Interlocutor—
Miniscule stela of seasalt
Or eau de cologne
On a nerve.

III

To shingle purgatory, speak.

And we were neither tried nor true
But permanently pressed

Into an awakening of rings
Into the gross invertebrate of being

And the apparatus of rapture
Being folded into a column or a flag

Saying bring us this day
A more tenuous champion

Bring us this day even more
Sinew in the eye of the beholder

A tuft of headlights in the rotunda
As deliberate as a cairn

Or the looseleaf volcanology of
Branches seen through a rosario

Defibrillating the face of the angel
We climb out of

IV

Our sibylls are surrounded by
The doppler audio of clouds

By the rural hauteur of constellations
Their unembezzled echoes

Filling in the empty space
Ever since pessimism became a luxury

One long articulation of moth

Being bifurcated in a horoscope
Every time we use inertia

To mute the vein
To mutate ourselves into surplus

In order to endure the brute chiffonier of soul
Its contents. Intangible. Zeitgeist

A gist

V

But there’s majesty in waiting

Between the lyric and its endeavor
To recognize its crest

Because it’s vulnerable to be heard
To prepare the forest for nostalgia

In the alchemy of solitude
That rings the perihelion awake

And we know the pastoral is dead
As we shoulder the joyride

Heads held together, retrospective
In the rarest candor

Whenever the ear can pitch for itself.

Sturm und Drang

Finally the Enlightenment is over
Thank God

There’s windchill on the earth again
Its simile is plaster

And the iris stands on the countryside
Crimped by time

Where the aether spurts its solitaire
As we wait

Annually pent up in heavy cornucopias
And we wait

Since the heart’s allure lies in its tenses
Jealous of the future

Envy, said Henri Fuseli, blasts
The living

This endless retrograde of horns
Enters our words

If we were made ripe in our loneliness
We scoured it

And ripped the sphagnum off our eyes
And slept

At the black assembly of branches
Face-haunted

To bleed alone inside the sublime
Irrational

Failed sportsmen of expressionism,
We forfeit

To the staghounds and daffodils
Of vigor

We’re only approximately here
Throttling God

Choking on the horns of auroras
Their stonefruit.

Poem

This palimpsest is the skin trade

I provide for, an annual crackling

Into wonder—a laurel fixation

Hanging over the sternum

Like the gathering of straw.

A muscle surrounding an opening,

Bruised into pasture. Tawny in

The sky, meridianed into a dove.