The black bird assembles out of achromatics
where the green tiger meets lumbering blood
bears on a livid road under moon,
that mounted stone, buoyant as hunger.
Whale eyes wink out the stars,
briefly, and the sea floors rise like
things that expel breath and cloud.
What about him, the bear, red as stalemate?
See children miles back following and a man watching
from the light-grazed hill as a woman draws
with berry-red ink just—foul—bright—worlds
on the river’s friable beach the color of bone
writes them all.
The women will meet in the valleys hauling
countries by ropes. Those heavy places
where humans pretend to die.
The drag marks
they make are wide, white, and deep.
The sun remakes itself in windows.
They kissed under trees and shared iPod
buds as water rushed in from the edge
of the world, the birds calling
with the strain of distant trains in the desert
where all that matters is liquid splashing
out of stone
and the tiniest seed tumbles
out of the dark like
the last word of a poem
the last slash of a brush
landing on white dead center.
