From “Coosa”

To be a bride of my own lamentation I wear a dress not of time’s poisoned quills but feathers of discontent — kingfishers ghosting in cornstalks, my field of frozen flutes. The edge of descent, digression’s highway brings a particulate ash to my mouth, starry metals of the meadow’s cold snap, ravens in the sycamore scorched to black. I follow their echo’s loop and chase. I master the map of never, raft its fragments, mouth the brightness of human’s leftover snow, details of fever-clouds where the convent dissolves in violence. I wear the canyon like a blank eye, lay before the never-returning light my silhouette, fossil of the drowned town’s scroll. • Here, where your ghost is always departing the ebb and flow of terrestrial tides, I follow your echo’s loop and chase, vortex streets of a cylindrical sound infinite in its arrangements of light. The evening veil, a partial reveal — how I appear to myself looking past this fact of being underway. Each day I stow my earthen materials in preparation for the never-end. In the snapshot of my dead friend, hanging in the room where loved ones refuse return: a gradual reduction of color. Running out of time, neck-deep in water, we knew no one was coming to help us in the same way one denies language to come from a picture. I imagine love a revelation, not of mind — the blue gauze of planetary motion — a tone-on-tone painting of a body floating on the sea’s shifting horizons. It is a question of legibility. When I became tired of depicting poetry, I became aware of another kind of plane, the kind good for dwellings and their narrative escape. Here children sit up all night by the flames — the orphan boy from blood-stained pottery who singed his head and burned out both his eyes. That was your life, a prefix for fire. Spider will weave a ladder to your heart, it is said, even though you are sleeping, intoxicated by abandonment, a bitter wind reminiscent of a wave. • In the last days of my marriage to god, I wandered his spiraled library to read in the dark blank imprints of trees. Relentless navigation through the stacks of shell-tempered mortuary offerings, sandstone saws recovered from the caves. I lingered on the stairs of the convent to write these things, to recollect myself. Around midnight the mountains returned. The clouds dispersed into semicolons and I with them, into a new language, its boat temporary, invisible. I knew I would be traveling like this for centuries. This was my first attempt at vanishing. I would return before anyone noticed poems to be found in the forest, not the mind. There’s a canyon between this version of me and the shadow in the corner that is mine. I wear this canyon like a blank eye.