Unfruitful

I think through how I am opposite of fruit,

then move on from my body

to the missing coyotes’ cries.

Our nightly walks

unearth such absence.

The newly built houses

in the former coyote field

are also beautiful at night,

empty beacons —

Desire depends on what is not there

yet. I no longer write of snow because there’s none this year.

We listen for the owls, too.

My thoughts are my body

yet disrupt my body, thread the missing, stitch un to fallow fields, to the beginning

of everything–

Fruit begins with emptied follicles, echoes.

How every night we must

walk the dog, oh       how we create time,

walking these ghost fields,

unfruitful.

Annual Review

Still –           we’re here talking around goals

as if the terminal edges

are not retreating

inward           as if

the mind could still wander

beyond this beige room.

This year and the last and I can be summed up as a beige room,
as a beige room full of sighs

also –

time calculated in heartbeats and dollars
both mine and beyond mine
still beating and silenced,           lungs and lungs
beating lungs, sonograms
sound seeking light,
a cry looking for its echo –

My mind is blue –
to use an image you’ll understand.
My mind is most itself in the lung-heart      the inner ear
of a glacier, slowing its pace,
calming its walk.           The slowest interval
needed
to
still
be
alive.

This is my goal.

Winter: Trying to Learn Sign Language

I’m trying to learn sign language
knowing I’ve forgotten words in other forms.
My palms grasp uncertain futures.

Finally, some snow –

My mind goes there,           the space between

sky and marcescent hands     –           future hope

& inevitable melt

What is winter now.

I have forgotten to check on the disappeared,
I build     I try     but still I forget
what my body held –

Each day, I walk past the decaying squirrel and tell no one,
until now
& the dead squirrel becomes ours to share. Here:

My students hand the words I give them back to me,
leave them on slips of paper, throw them away,
leave
the room full
of silence.

The motion for failure is fingers sweeping
the palm – brushing away all I hold.

Still.         Still, the possibility that my palms can hold language.

Full Sentence

I.

My body like thunder across the field
like thinking                like thunder
across the grove          beyond the sky —    my mind
I think,           now the lightning           now –

I try to name the trees, the grass, the soil.
Words hold me, containers of hope
limbs sway,

thunder &
I’m trying to tell you
I’m grasping for connection
tendons           rhizomes
All I have are shards
of an imprecise mind.

II.

Tell me a poem                Tell me a good poem
& I will ask you again –

What is the tree’s name, the one I love?
The deep bark grooves, her sky seeking fingers
birdfull

Say: elm      and I will love you
forever, like a poem
like a memory

III.

even the sentence sieves,
yields to the pressure of holding meaning
there is no perfect body
I
feel whole
I
fragment
I
outside
return
inward
whole

what is it to ruin
meaning or soil
or

perfect fragment
I ask so much to be held in you
my heart
I hold I ask:
tiny egg, why
are you not heart-centered, why do we not say by ova, by way of follicle
by bud and love

I used to look to stars, no
constellations
(how impossible to take the sky in
we must fragment, sift sight)

Now, I’m lost in body now
return to navel
thinking through the pieces
thought decomposes
singularly
wholeness is a myth

Try,
a full sentence
 

Thank you

We won’t name
in the end,
In the end, take away language that looks backward.
In the end, even the birds are vague –

In the end of love,
for example,
it’s enough to say not,
it’s enough to say
was and knew
and yesterday.
There is an end and you are there –
there will be a bird
whose name I don’t know
but whom I will love.

Quietly enough the Stellar’s jay does not startle,
we walked, yesterday.

There was a misunderstanding when I said love
and you returned it.

Thank you.