Cloud Aquarium

          for Noel Black




I only love myself in rust

A choir of ants
bubbles up
like a garden trying
to move itself
away from the curb

What will you do
with my milky manners?

Let them soothe you into a flutter of aspen
Let them soak

Antennae, thorax, a kiss
carrying 50× its weight
in fatherless ghosts

The stubble of abandonment
grows back like yarrow

but a kiss of cloud cover is another way
of saying, it’s okay, we work in rust


◊


From where we are
in the mountains
we watch a grey cat devour
a large mouse of the same color

a ring of skin rips off
the throat
like a scarlet necklace

Nothing I love is prim
Nothing I desire is proper

Like trespassing in a garden
how could this sway
of color belong to anyone?


◊


Someone I almost loved
once told me,
There’s something to be said
for a bit of sensory deprivation
as long as it ends with something spectacular

I almost desired this
which almost made me
love someone

Though I’m afraid of the reverse:
letting myself feel
something spectacular
then having it yanked away

Milky oak
or rusty milk or ants
churning through milk
like an oaky omen—
You are not someone
who was once

No, you water
buttery irises that lounge
like golden retrievers
thirsty for pats on the head
Each time you return to me
a little more
found than lost
Each time we return to the mountain
I sway a little less prim
& proper

Press me against this tree

Rust like scabs
I want to soak
to reveal fresh skin
the pink of it, it’s possible

to be tender with desire

the hover of a hummingbird
stirring sugar


◊


From where we are
on this mountain
the window is
a cloud aquarium

Though clouds cannot
exit anything

They grip me, the clouds
You grip me like a view

You plant dianthus &
anticipate a loyal return
of coral fringes

I’m afraid of the reverse—
a season disrupted, of what
may rush in
to the deprivation

Yet almost is the necklace
of regret

Then I remember how
the moon works

the spectacular nightliness
of how anything you say
could belong in a poem

like wooden hummingbirds
clicking over the blackest soil

The exact trespass of skin
to release your sleep

We’re not here only to deliver or
collect— I trust there must
be something in between that sways:
A green shoot— The loose moon—
A thumbprint in the softest pear

Your body in the morning before
any eye opens