the story goes: he once spread a thin band of glue to catch a passerine. his flaxen ploy, festooned to a forsythia, swayed and sought her little shadow. she saw him through a window, closed in early may. the sight lines never met. perhaps, she baked her bread, type ten-fifty. perhaps, he kneeled patiently, lone and ailing, veiled behind a tidy rock garden. perhaps, she waited too:

   hunting
        for ancestors
               to be sung
                     without a pause:

last night, i dreamt a gold oriole flew inside, flapped her wings and traced our walls bright. i caught her and held her light then took it to an open window to let her fly. but she forgot, like a rock forgets, and when she fell she left no body, no blood, no feather, nothing but a dark, cold oblong.

towards
nearly
against

by breathing, she once told me her name.
                  be
                    -ha.
                   short for my country.

on grading the thoughts on death, i start from myself. like most of us, he built the first one of many and many of the same: a night of counting syllables, therefore, like a cigarette smoking on a footpath:

dah   
   duhom
duh   
   dahom

to keep conversing, you reverse your voice, now sounding danish. i will hear you like an ocean / fury / a bind ungathered / i will hear you as we ravel there where a mark was made:

               1) talk me through a seashell
               2) teach an island to pray

this is to be said with a verb that’s holding hands and something being dropped. while walking on a footpath – open-handed – i am sleeping with all my dear, departed places. to a provincial border crossing, this book is bound by the longest arm pulling downward: you can round it to a number but don’t forget to throw the bones behind her house (not bigger than a nail) her mother’s house (not bigger than a nail) / our every road a hair unruly but

say that to an island for

pray it to a seashell:

it is sometimes stated that, given a vast number of finite, the infinity of time, our history must need repeat itself. how? think a wallpaper, the two who swing in different swings and are, at times, at their lowest or think some closer: the two now small, infinitesimal, racing to and fro the diameter of a perfect circle (where no such thing ever exists). it is sometimes stated that there is no limit to the size of displacement, the position any two bodies may occupy (where “body” an abstraction, a “site of history”, they say, and “any” is just plain old lazy). it is then no wonder we prefer a breath: a draft that lands on cheek and stays there like a wave does (from and through another country) but past is irregular, cities not repeating: our waves break night’s watch and there are we in waves and there is weave in waves / the waves of tongue (might say) weave the we:

he sings a syllable “come” until it (finally) rings a bell. the moon is at home in the sign of cancer and i am as close to you, warm beneath the rubble. with everyone around, she covered the sun with her thumb and left an impression in the early sky: just like that, the day was gone, out-bandoned. it’s the sort of thing my mother’s good at, feeling the weather / weathering feelings, someday, i thought, her colour will wash away, seeping through in golden sand. it hasn’t: a body does what a body does but what do i do if a feather becomes heavy?

tonight the winds got up and took our plans away. they sang on stage in five voices, five different voices, though he only called them once


i am __,
i am __,
i am __,
i am __,
i am __.                 *


* all they bring is inflatable. i watch it from the side, no matter what and how unlikely. but it’s the same with consonants, he says: one drops a diamond and might / as well / bet a river in there.

while eating an ice cream with a small spoon, you look like yourself. despite the good-fortune double six, the flavours were omitted. ours were clear: caramel vanilla, alone, hunched fore, a pond turtle licking on our feet: she left the morning after. last year, they found an old revival stranded on the shore: it’s a sign, they yelled, it was a sign, they yelled, a bloated carcass, bellied up. the prophecy holds all war will start when a wildflower loses its smell / if north becomes south and south becomes north: two sides of one coin. yet, we’re still here – bawling at beds and cursing edges. sleeping, i moved a sofa some couple steps north, sat down and brought it back (where futile means becoming small). from the inside of her pocket, she felt how past is here to haunt the present, how present wants it: (yes) but what about white cakes / what about a million white cakes – baked / not baked – all over her lot. who knows, i never saw it as a glitch: maybe (just maybe) our world got sweet.

some days easy on somersaults, bridges, splits and backflips, today i stand on your feet like progress in arabic, installed as a measure, “i love you so much” but abbreviated. see, i carry a world on my hip and nothing upon shoulders, but hips are for lovers, shoulders for losses: how wide can you go?

          i am as wide as the first pasture: i grow on roots and fall into west: shoeless, i spread rushnyks we caught offguard (they’re stiff as snow, we’re white as snow) and yes, there’s nothing less in a frost-eaten country: nothing less and nothing more. now compare this to snow: the steps are close / the days are close / the breaths are close and slow and heated / life itself / impossibly occurring / we, however –––––

her plump lower lip over my fingertip.

                     i want to believe a burden leaves this cup. instead, she reads people, voices and a road: broad and broken. we hear, not the tongues they speak, or what they speak, but the letters they slip from our names. in a neon office, my forefinger’s held against the scanner, again and again. among her roses, i lick and pin and wish a wish: it will, it has, it always comes true:

there must be meaning in circles.

behind a cherry plum, we played with walls, and as we played with walls, we played with shellholes:

you thought the fruit might hurt,
(we let it rot)
you thought the tree might hurt,
(we didn't climb)
you thought the words might hurt,
(so i waited)

somewhere, some children dash with scissors in their hands. but lines are still living in this country. only five cuts free the petals:




her plump lower lip over my fingertip.     she finds no thorn.