paper and tape, 24″ × 33″
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Someone in singing. No.
It’s the stones in the river. No.
The river is muttering my name.
I lower myself into liquid history,
my skin takes in, and lets go
the tale. The river: clouds
gone to ground. It’s what has
happened and what will.
You find your way,
or you make it.
***
Edges faltering to leaflight and grit.
It’s the breeze first that begins
the undoing, off the fast cascade,
sunslant whiting the roiled waters,
and the sound that uncouples
ears from heartbeat, to tune
the tuneless shuffle of moving
water and leaves, birdpeep, phoebes
today and one silent circles,
setting its own rhythm with each pass
across the sun, and I’m undone and
rivered, Cloud lives in me, on me,
sky in my eye.
***
A pale litter of caddisfly larva
is plastered to a boulder.
The sun shuttles through the trees
as it eases down past the hill
that shrouds the hollow in constant shadow.
I have known such darkness and wild.
But not for a long time.
It’s caught me today, liquid cursive of current,
commas of foam I keep trying to read.
***
Here are my tears.
Here’s a tire.
Take my toy,
and my pee,
and my paper.
Here is the tangled metal
of my town guard rail.
Here is my grocery cart
whose wheels turn with the churn
of your current.
***
You are current.
And past.
You are future in all your selves,
origins, endings.
Earth and air.
Mouth and head.
You seem to go only one way.
But look, there,
a spray of you.
You rise upward too.
***
River, I’m deepening myself
as you too recarved yourself
with passing storms.
River, wind writes on you as time
scrolls on me.
Do you also often think of endings?
No, you thread yourself into
the next body. I too am woven
in this world, and lost track
at times, of where I end,
where to begin.
***
You are never uncertain,
even at your lowest.
You know which way to go.
But you will lose yourself
when you get there.
***
Stumbling over your own self,
you are ever going and coming,
not entirely arriving.
Though you have a source,
it is fed of other beginnings.
You have a mouth but when it opens
you may lose your voice.
What you you pass
changes with your passing.
You have a bed
but it barely holds your body
some days; others you lie small in it.
You remember little though
bring much with you.
Ever immigrant.
Ever refugee,
your home is cloud.
Arrive to disperse,
you are never quite yourself.
***
Weary now, you have diminished yourself,
edges exposed, mudded grasses,
pale roots of trees,
many rocks denuded to sun,
exposed like the sudden notice:
the tender skin of another’s wrist,
vessels so close to the surface.
