Would you were where my sister keeps her bones,
deep in her body, perfecting
their whiteness. I know teeth
troubling flesh, nubbin
chewed from the nail. Tasting salt
and alloy. Before we were sisters
lovers in the clipped field
whirled tarantella, courted
hillocks and the electric
fence without consequence,
swam in the abandoned
calcite quarry, its rain
dead of frogs and fish.
The road pulls like a half-sleep
protracted. An evening, further
evening unrolls
the overlong length of the road.
In a corridor of rain-thicked trees
smothered idylls are rising.
White wine whispers
through the shifting leaves,
a gilded currency flitted with breathing
An understatement
of breathing. The kick comes
embryonic inside me.
In the clearing, the scrub pine’s shadow
recedes, permitting light
its butchery. Wildflowers curl into themselves
with mechanized intellect. This is not wilderness
between us, just a predictable distance
overdressed, every occasional tendril, dusk-rushed grove
bearing deliberate resemblance
to the accident we made
writhing in the net of creepers.
There are no accidents. Even the animals--
especially the animals, their choired gaze
so reliably exultant. Nowhere to withdraw
in a smothering underbrush—nowhere
in an assumption commonwealth
in which to find togetherness
is not the way I like it. Consider: we share a literal tongue.
Moony, jasmine dehisces
a pliant seed. Faces
of the beautiful boys and girls,
rooting toward
imbroglio, break dirt.
Blood-orange moon—
spunking palms.
As circumstance
is moral authority, no one
is or is not deranged. Nor is here
to be accounted as snakes
sighing through the tall grass,
a rabbit’s imperative
to stomp. What in such plenitude
may resist. The rutted
path ornamenting itself over
already cannot bear
children. But in the creepers,
a rudimentary
musculature is assembling.
Today is your birthday.
I.
Could you step out into this city, as approaching
the crest of its hill
its amber pin-prick
carillon is upswept: could you
go further, o honeyed black
seraph is unkempt, is rising, spreading
its future as pennons sidereal
but that are not the stars.
But on foot there is no nevering
the stars.
II.
We turned back frightened by the carcass of a dog.
As if it were your parents,
in the woods, the hairs of your body
responding
before your body knew further. Your parents
in their perpetual wintering. The gibbous moon came
long ossified, done bone
diffuse in the long
unwatched night. Frightened. As if it were
my parents.
III.
At the end of reverse passage
the plush heathering skies of the canyon
past dusk, and further: could it be
believing in war begins there
still, as the cat on the stony jut practices
its jaw with languor
of the unchallenged: unfueled, knowing nothing
of this modern bargaining, for trust and hedges. And one of us
might have wept for it.
IV.
So lessons in basic geography became lessons in how with hunger
to identify the cardinals. Wild, clustered
back country habitations, huckleberry, hunting lantern, sanctuary
in a stand of pines, a steeple of pines, complications
of electronica, railroads, myth of the self-
made man, where is the golf course.
If we were touched it was still a childhood
of strengthened ankles. I have arrived at the end
of drugs so before this
we might tremble.