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What is there behind color
a restiveness
portents of faces

outlined merely
by touch
the color of palms

nerve worlds
with the consistency
of trachea

or sand
or birds trilling
against the moon’s chill

or confidence
raising a fist
to the burry wind

listen
the pines
efface
a brooding sky

When you go deeper the fish
turn from black to raspberry
she said on a different occasion.
We met under a tree. Her hair white,
she (maybe too) aware of sea bubbles
at the momentary brush of the wind.

The crabs in the trees taste like apples.
The roots in the ground absorb
memories the dead whisper
under what they take for dust
or ash in the troposphere
but it’s all release from days to day,
and the monotony of the body’s
involuntary heaving.

The wind sometimes goes gritty here
in the high places, where clouds reach
for your ears with purple timbre
and cracking like pressure sensitive beams.
I once saw a country sink
into the sea and cows chewing
and an eagle take something that looked like
kite string from the belly of a friend.

The eye goes yellow in the valley
where we played harps. Gray
in the rain that burns with acids
the crowds milling under sunset.
Pass through tomorrow and I’ll
play you songs, if I’m able,
about a cup, a horse, and that nail
penetrating your shoe
when you leapt from the roof
thinking you could fly
and drag the earth behind you.

in that crack between
the colors a gnat moves against
the wet of a squirrel’s eye
and makes green, charcoal,
and the dyes that erect
motion on the edge of a leaf,
where water drops roll,
reflecting the real curve
of planets we wonder over
and need for navigation

without circles blind squirrels
will scratch the wrong names in stones
and the gnats will swim forever
in honey streaks, against windows
filled with false suns,
dreaming of triangles and squares
and colors yet to burst
from the river scrim
and the bloody brush

AND

how does the rat with a traveling stick
and hat connect to China or some other
place where stones are stones
people eat ivory rice and take in the air
on soft nights when it’s not raining
and the knives and guns have gone
silent, like winter frogs
or the dead themselves

by plane and boat

he’s been there too many
days and has
stepped down the stairs
of airports
between aggressive heels
in search of a cab
and a drink to relax with
in a chair
by a window where he can
wish his love back
or by the fire where he elevates
to the memory of her fingers and flowers.
outside
snow respires
in the depthless black
and everyday brings
something new, a new face,
a new shadow,
a tap at the window,
a walk to the door, an opening
with hesitation

they ask themselves
in with messages, gifts
that smell of wind-dried laundry
and pecan hulls,
and fists full of small flowers.
they say they never thought
a rat could keep such clean digs, observe
kindnesses
that made their finding him
worth the rawer streets. he said
you remind me of a day
I met a friend on an empty but
threatened road. you have her
eyes and her hands. I can tell you
all about her (they said here here),
the flowers she drew at the borders
and I can help
you find cracks in the colors
where orchids sleep
and lilies follow the song
of yellow, blood, and moon

I disembark in a different country with a nagging language
At my back, clever, persistent, sometimes pungent, abundant
As the fur of seals, orange as fire leaves on unfinished land masses.

At night I rode from panthers, vampires, swore that those
Clicks at my back bike wheel had to be lycanthrope
Teething for my neck. Home, I’d laugh through the relief of safe escape.

Then to leave it. Not I but he who lost a finger and roused
In the masked stitcher thoughts of lost instruments
Hushed by the small print of books, fetches at the river
With a father who didn’t utter much, himself
Lost in a face he once saw singing at the late night fireside.

Something of forewarning in the shake of his fingers
At the final trussing, after which he sent me
Down the laminated hall out with a bottle of pain pills
And a word to watch for infection and the tricks coyotes
Play on the rocks above the interstate.

After lunch with friends I saw a painted tiger
Slowly grinding to dust behind a thick wall of glass
And inexplicably drew out the memory
Of touches I felt in another country where I’d nearly
Been run down by a bus.

A palm down the side of my cheek outside the Catedral Metropolitana,
The echo of four footsteps on the paths of Chapultepec, small hands,
Like acorns in the grass, clasped. Birds clucked behind the feather-thin
Leaves where we might have hid if the light had held.

He carries himself into new countries, trailing the hes already
Passed here and whose shoulders and heads can be seen
In the shadows of lamps. He locks the door. I turn down the hall.
An afternoon picture window burns against the black.

The man who could fly beat his wings
above the bush and took the best close-up
of a butterfly ever snapped or so he wanted.

But the butterflies, the hummingbirds, the wasps
were unimpressed. With their beaks, song, and stingers,
they poked and stabbed and lunged, called
for reinforcements: poked, stung, and lunged.

The man had grown gold pinions from his fingers.
The hard bones of his forearms and humerus
stretched long and hollow, like flutes.
But the multilingual wasps know contrivance.
They huddled with the crows and the hummingbirds.

Swarming, they tore the man to the down and deleted his jpegs.
They taught him soil, schooled him on the invention of mud.

This day the rain comes with a rhythm
in minion with the movement of boats
lashed on the mauve river.
Two boys flee the court, slapping shoulders
at the touch of oceans in cycle, something warm
waiting at home on the stove. The little boils are like crowds
rushing from catastrophe, granulated countries
falling remote from the sky. The rain suggests
hungers to come, empty spaces after the passing
of crows, or friends and their laughter over diner and wine.

I remember coming down from the mountain
with dew on my eye lids to grieve on an empty village,
where men with mad lights in their eyes
blink in the grass, fish tails half-chewed in their mouths.
They tell deep water tales. They recall clinquant
idioms that fell into the carpet of long, wooden
halls like dead pollen, in capitols where hands
open and close like cathedral doors.
They smell of hard rain and smoke.

I see a man with an empty can
and slippers departing the gardens with a shaking
head and a glass of old wine and marks
on his face where monsters scraped for his tongue.
His skin is a ferocity of pits and he works stones
from his mouth with a shoe horn
to plop into the puddles like plums.
He waits in a cellar for someone
to trim his nails, coach his ignorance
with the language of agora
and fossils. He watches a thin set of fingers feel
beneath the door, and then the story ends as all
good stories must with a promise of love, the sound
of an opened door, an apple half-eaten,
and moonlight shattered
on the street by a foot.

Yes, the clouds come with rain the color of blood.
I see a man raise his mouth to the fury and laugh.
I recall the boys, the madmen, those old cities
where stories are told over food and wine
and friends wave goodbye under their
umbrellas and disappear into the rain
and the gardens.

I hear cries, parts of old and timorous
song above the lissom, mint-tinted boats.

Morning clouds tear at the trees.
Maybe I’m a wind that blows East.
I pick up voices, green leaves, gift ribbon.

In my stomach I carry a copper bell,
two giraffes, and a dragon who says
nothing lasts or stays found, most importantly
the knees, the tongue, rumors of clear weather.

I toss them all up to Kármán air,
nearest the sun, where oxygen grasps for life.
They open, laugh like ferns above the storms.
A man stops, turns to the river. He thinks he hears his name,
remembers what he’d once lost to the wind.