D. A. Powell

were lifted over the valley, its steepling dustdevils the redwinged blackbirds convened vibrant arc their swift, their dive against the filmy, the finite air the profession of absence, of being absented, a lifting skyward then gone the moment of flight: another resignation from the sweep of earth jackrabbit, swallowtail, harlequin duck: believe in this refuge vivid tips of oleander white and red perimeters where no perimeter should be here is another in my long list of asides: why have I never had a clock that actually gained time? that apparatus, which measures out the minutes, is our own image forever losing and so the delicate, unfixed condition of love, the treacherous body the unsettling state of creation and how we have damaged— isn’t one a suitable lens through which to see another: filter the body, filter the mind, filter the resilient land and by resilient I mean which holds which tolerates the inconstant lover, the pitiful treatment the experiment, the untried & untrue, the last stab at wellness choose your own adventure: drug failure or organ failure cataclysmic climate change or something akin to what’s killing bees—colony collapse more like us than we’d allow, this wondrous swatch of rough why do I need to say the toads and moor and clouds— in a spring of misunderstanding, I took the cricket’s sound and delight I took in the sex of every season, the tumble on moss the loud company of musicians, the shy young bookseller anonymous voices that beckoned to ramble to be picked from the crepuscule at the forest’s edge until the nocturnal animals crept forth their eyes like the lamps in store windows forgotten, vaguely firing a desire for home hence, the body’s burden, its resolute campaign:  trudge on and if the war does not shake us from our quietude, nothing will I carry the same baffled heart I have always carried a bit more battered than before, a bit less joy for I see the difficult charge of living in this declining sphere by the open air, I swore out my list of pleasures: sprig of lilac, scent of pine the sparrows bathing in the drainage ditch, their song the lusty thoughts in spring as the yellow violets bloom and the cherry forms its first full buds the tonic cords along the legs and arms of youth and youth passing into maturity, ripening its flesh growing softer, less unattainable, ruddy and spotted plum daily, I mistake—there was a medication I forgot to take there was a man who gave himself, decently, to me & I refused him in a protracted stillness, I saw that heron I didn’t wish to disturb was clearly a white sack caught in the redbud’s limbs I did not comprehend desire as a deadly force until— daylight, don’t leave me now, I haven’t done with you— nor that, in this late hour, we still cannot make peace if I, inconsequential being that I am, forsake all others how many others correspondingly forsake this world light, light: do not go I sing you this song and I will sing another as well

this is the track I've had on REPEAT all afternoon:      she is butterfly brilliant riband, rice flour face, silken, even her voice a sashed kimono if I were foolish like her: but aren't I foolish like her spotting the coil of smoke and the billowed sail against the verge of sky simple on the rise surveying the anchorage:      simple me, signal me dreading the confident assumption of return, dreading more uncertain tone to come, the thinning notes, performance too close to my own impatient—swells, a surge:      sick wind but the emotion is, after all, an artfully conjured gesture arranged marriage between a past ache and frail woodwinds I could skip ahead could break the inconsolable loop of harbor, waiting, overlook, waiting, inevitable waning eye troubled robins, once more in the handkerchief trees once more, brief aquarelle of triplet lilies, blue as willowware in that interval before his embrace falters, stuck, founders [shuffle play]    such a pitch of tenderness in the voice such an awful lot of noise

Where we could be boys together. This region of want: the campestrial flat. The adolescents roving across the plat. Come hither. He-of-the-hard would call me hither. Sheer abdomen, sheer slickensides, the feldspar buttes that mammillate the valley right where it needs to bust. And I could kiss his tits and he could destroy me on the inflorescent slopes; in his darkest dingles; upon the grassland’s raffish plaits. And he could roll me in coyote brush: I who was banished to the barren could come back into his fold, and I would let him lay me down on the cold, cold ground. Clouds, above, lenticular, the spreading fundament, a glorious breech among the thunderheads and in their midst, a great white heron magnifies the day. We’d keep together, he and I, and we’d gain meaning from our boyage; we’d pursue each other through the crush of darkling rifts. Climb into each other’s precipitous coombes. Where would it end, this brush and bush, this brome and blazing star? There is always some new way to flex a limb and find its secret drupe. Not only the hope of nature; the nature of hope: so long as culverts carry us, so long as we stay ripe to one another’s lips, and welcoming to hands, as long as we extend our spans, to tangle them, as spinning insects do their glistered floss. This is not a time to think the trumpet vine is sullen. Rather: the trumpet’s bell is but a prelude. It says we all are beautiful at least once. And, if you’d watch over me, we can be beautiful again.

if you didn’t mind the bible you’d surely mind the belt