Peter Campion

A current like a noise machine through sleep. Blue lichen fields. Mossed boulders. Waking up to ice cubes cracking in a plastic cup and voices (“awesome for the Hong Kong branch . . . well, most of all we miss our daughter . . . ”) I still see it: the climb up slate as runnels spill from some bare misted summit like a source. Whatever sense this dream might make to others. And whatever when they wake they also have been dreaming. Rivers of faces down hallways, merging, as desires mesh and fissure. Cash for clothes or arms or flesh. And if there is no towering sublime where all comes clear to all, no final climb through cloud, like some old Bible illustration: how could that ever stop the current flowing out of the glass at jfk : skin glowing plumb and peach as we walk inside the sun.

a ladybug, its carapace blown open so a translucent trace of orange gleams from its body, has ascended link by link the smudgy silver curve of my watch band. It must have helicoptered past the sill while I was slumped here squinting in the paper at the ashen packaging another bombing's made of a minivan. Made available in the photo like the homeless in a poem. The pain is far away. But then for moments utterly clear: molten metal guttering down from the Milky Way to fall on us. And sometimes, God, it lands with all its will. My spluttered prayer for it to hold its distance: how ludicrous to blurt it from this comfort. Still it impels itself from me. Please stay away from me. Please stay away from this insectile soul who only weeks ago was wind and shit and jasmine leaves and rain.

In a culvert by the airport under crumbling slag wine colored water seeps to this pool the two does drink from: each sipping as the other keeps look out. The skyline is a blur of  barcode and microchip. Even at home we hold the narrowest purchase. No arcs of tracer fire. No caravans of fleeing families. Only this suspicion ripples through our circles of lamp glow (as you sweep the faint sweat from your forehead and flip another page in your novel) this sense that all we own is the invisible web of our words and touches silence and fabulation all make believe and real as the two does out scavenging through rose hips and shattered drywall: their presence in the space around them liveliest just before they vanish.

After the cling of roots and then the “pock” when they gave way the recoil up the hand was a small shock of emptiness beginning to expand. Milk frothing from the stems. Leaves inky green and spiked. Like blissed-out childhood play turned mean they snarled in tangled curls on our driveway. It happens still. That desolating falling shudder inside and then our neighborhood seems only sprawling loops...like the patterns eaten on driftwood: even the home where I grew up (its smell of lingering wood-smoke and bacon grease) seems just a shell of lathe and paper. But this strange release follows: this tinge like silver and I feel the pull of dirt again, sense mist uncurling to reveal no architecture hidden behind the world except the stories that we make unfolding: as if our sole real power were the power of children holding this flower that is a weed that is a flower.