You see everything as formless and you forget
        that this is a sign of life.
        —Hilma af Klimt


Nearness is owed me
There is a sea of red

Lights suspended fifteen feet
Above the tarmac

Something bad
Is beating about the color

Taken, as in carried
Away. Taken in transgression

The left face of the form
And the right, running

Into one another like
Stress waves in solids

The wrong hills and valleys
Like when you can’t read

The harm in my tone
I can pull you

Across the tarmac
In my fury, fervor

I am roving over the lots
Metal stakes in the frozen

Ground, tufts of brown grass
Ice pilings, I follow the pattern

Large wings unbending
Go up with a start

+

I’m not going to make it
I promise

A spotlight streaming close
Is like that of a medical theater

Brief apparitions, before the whole
Body warps and turns, my hands

Hold the paper, marking heat
I listen for the break

The gravity, and the scare
What is suspended

Is not mine. If I am waiting
I have exhausted myself

If I am tracking back
To my body, I have already failed

If I am making excuses
For my absence

I am not ready to respond
Truthfully to my own weakness

Doctor, I am reaching. I am
Not mean. I have not pushed yet

+

I woke up angry
In my dream

At the shore, her blood
Washed around like a weak tide

A sine/cosine of my own
Interference. I am

The cold forming the ice
My body runs this

Show like the unseen edge
Of an electromagnetic field

The luminescent cast at my wrist
Was a thin screen I read through

I wanted to beat and course
Where I stood, the pressure

In my face was a ten
Even miles away

That raggedy mass hung together
I was trying to leave

While my friend on the lakefront
Was dying of pancreatic cancer

I’d starve at the light field, waiting
For a question. Creatinine 3.1

Creatinine 1.9 Certain 2.4
Certain 4.3. A god

Of monsters, minus one
Point. To lose composure

Stranded on a darkening
Shore. This is a kind of loving

+

Before going back to my life
On the Cape, I sat at night

And I sat in the morning
Watching her breathe

In J 8-5, while I was away
A strange case

Try again. Telephone
Rounds. A mass

Confusion of lights
I couldn’t speak on

I let my neck roll
My head back

I let my fingers pull
Arms and torso together

You are in a kind of pain
That wakes you

The pain response
Is the oldest landscape

The limbic home, an arrow
Plumbs this image

Into the ground. When you die
In a medical trial

It can be what is known
As an adverse advent

How many previous
Now with a home in the sky

I believe in the body
Having to be pricked

Having to let her blood
Run into tubes. Pull the needle

Now, like Leonardo at the morgue
Pulling back the flesh