Joseph Massey

In a patch of sunlight a decapitated grasshopper twitches. The sunlight twitches. Sky the size of a sky imagined. Squint to see the quarter moon —shallow gash on blue horizon. Squint to hear beyond windows wafting muzak. I’m half-awake in this field of turned-on particulars. A wreck of yellow blossoms under a barn-door window. A barn door without the barn.

Dawn marks the wall a thin flange of off-blue An imagined silence Always an imagined silence The speed at which sleep’s fogged dialogue withers into the present noun-scape This rift valley A volley of seasonal beacons Window where mind finds orbit + All a world can do is appear The window intones A room whose walls warp with sun What’s seen is dreamed We think ourselves here

To imagine a morning the first sounds from the street and the house, its halls scarifying consciousness Antique glass smudges limbs (more blue than green) flared out over a roof To imagine the raw circumference of a field as it wakes what we make of it where our senses send us Gray oscillates gray and the mountain a line lodged within it gone slack at the end No need to mention weather The yard— the measure An unkempt garden bed convulses synchronous with traffic flashing through the fence Stone bench in a ring of weeds Shadows ring— a sound Bees doused in viscous sun, erased