I wrote a poem for the eighth year in a row Years like trees black breezes between them The same poem knew what I was doing I thought it began in a closet I put a heavy jacket on to suggest snow, tomb-like draughts of snow setting my feet down in my footprints The poem had a conductor, a host, a young man, older woman, even older man who invited me into his studio. He took the time out to bemoan what pigeons had done to the place He had not cleaned up their shit the place was drowned in a haze feces and feathers the haze of a man who had scratched himself into apparition. I saw pigeons whirling in the dirt of the cloth-like floor, the translation of greed into maggots: could wealth be defined as anything carried over the threshold of night into day? The woman explained how I was going to write the poem. presented it like a test. If the poem is hot or cold, is about something hot or cold, or about being hot or cold, you are required to make it hot or cold. In this poem you are shitting or are covered in shit, you are required to make and have shit, then, in your poem, and so on. I was given long narrow strips of paper, cream-colored yellow mountains the sky between mountains yellow mountains say hello with your forehead, your temple, that is where Kannon Lives in perpetual unwanting My paper was already torn, I taped it together, found a seat at a cluttered work table, My daughter was the ceiling the utilities the rain on the roof the sky the planets water colors on a firmament adorned with faint, aspirational stars the bald rose, I wrote the eye of the bald rose The ear of the bald rose the bald rose opened its eye, there was no “its” The bald rose opened, The paper was a piece of turf I wrote off the page, onto the table, dusty with paint dried clay and dried paint The paper was a bandage the self-consciousness of human ruin flat on the rim of the gutter ong the wound a serial event To write a poem while being timed with seasons of instruction watching over, under the influence of a four month old daughter
The rainbow is white The milk is in the wall Where is the milk in the wall rings of milk on the wall, the steeple the rising of each nova
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The milk is a sunflower embedded in the adobe whittling a likeness, to pass on she passed on the wall called her grandmother's name, the names of her friends, she has heard, has not learned
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She sees her face with winter beard and antlers out of her head squash blossoms at the end
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she sees in the milk mother and father disappearing into the sheet the first four months, the milk is in the milk is in hours of broken sleep
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She puts her mouth on night fish that swarm then snap in one direction black vitamin She puts her mouth on the grapefruit without walking without crawling the distance between sunbursts, a relationship with the embodied enso, finding oneself naked and undistracted in the center of a labyrinth to endanger breathing in the center I am the Dila The fish are boomerang
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The milk is in the electrifying performance of Bumbuku, the Magic Teakettle the faces of the people in the audience form an ocean poppies each person the face of satisfaction coral’s second coming Bumbuku, the Magic Teakettle’s teakettle is filled with milk cloud summoning leaves of creosote riverine nostalgia of jojoba, poppies glowing magic as much in the awed expressions of the ocean as in the oceanic poppy awe of the people as it is in the trick of a half tanuki half teakettle dancing on a tightrope speaking to each other through the milk is omni
Ghosts, to the newborn, are on the ceiling and walls.
She sees the hill across the face
and the organization of the flock
the clouds pass
that drag a shadow
like heat,
eden
H
the advent as
the sainted characters
cannot stop moving
long enough
to become enshrined
and the glass clusters
up
side-down
the ceiling
is
a soil+
ghosts, are family transcending blood, the newborn would not feel them as deceased but dancing like autumn leaves that do not fall, but form a fluid layer, sphere with fish-like contours that pull away from limbs and levitate into a lipstick
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the autumn leaves of eden carry the strongest sentiments of light early evening the sun is pierced and hemorrhaging into the private lives of people on the verge of internally combusting
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I was dreaming her, she cried, her version of a scream four hours of sleep, of silence, then boiling tar,
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She stares at the wall and laughs. I am envious I have not found my laughter on an empty wall above the bed, the bathroom wall, in the living room not yet a wall Is it distance? Blue flames flying in a circle around a gummy skeleton or yellow aster entering dementia on a cloudy day, then falls away white, liquid shadows, impersonate sunlight on a river
I went to the rain to bring back the rain Maybe I could speak it Maybe I could translate the visions captivated inside each spacious crystal
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I went to the rain and saw three rats ascending stairs wearing flowers substantiated the advent of the hour were not ushers were cells of skin drawing back the hour the sleepless walk through
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I saw a water fountain illuminated above the rat contemplative cherished by interlocking people even more grievous for their desires, their decadent fortunes unenumerated in the water, had sley in it, now invective, oil from the eighty-eight year old trees were young when great-grandfather stood at the picture window above the park I saw his silhouette in the window. It was red then grinned magenta
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Rocks were partners People were muffins A statue was casual, listening to the rain I brought back afternoon udon a fox wedding crossing 3rd Avenue led by children no one stopped for echoing
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Every language lives by the storms on its surface, continents of water whipping across the mantle I ate rabbit the rabbit turned into rats on the steps of the temple after centuries, still being built in the furoshiki owl an amulet ringing flowers in utero (elbow)
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I went to my face to bring you my face I cried in the window saw serpentine rivers endless trays of uninhabited clouds and the bend and the bends swimming pools and prisons pit mines and kidneys When I saw the moon, I cried A bolt of homesickness moved through me The moon was the radiant vacuum chance had raised a tormented landscape and starless but a single satellite effaced, I could not contain it I missed my daughter who was, in that moment, far away from me, in her sack, on her cheek, because rats, and reading poetry in the rain
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I showed her the night before, the moon. It was full. same as the moon of my homesickness Radiant, drain of the sun It was more than 12 inches away, much closer than what she had been reading [She] stared into the flatness of space, saw her point on the circle and joined it