Swear
that you can lose yourself
easily
in something
if you want to be
close to me,

for the best friends I have
thrive
on a passion
outside themselves,

live as if they are constantly
writing letters to others
that begin with “To Whom
It May Concern,”

and go on for pages
of detail, obsession
writ tight and careful,
no detail left behind,

certain that whoever receives
the letter will be
concerned as they are concerned,

ending them always with,
“Love” or “I eagerly await
your response,” forgetting
(or perhaps omitting with intent)

their names, the least important
detail, not worthy of note
in the presence of the greater topic.

These are the people I love most:
the ones who can forget themselves in something
as I have forgotten myself.

We find each other
without worrying about who we are
because from the start,
from first contact,
we understood that we had it right:
we are incidental chips bobbing
in the wake of our love
for the torrents of this world.

red lights skewing
across the road
in the white darkness
and the visible wind.

we sleep through
someone’s near disaster,
ignorant for now of fear
of losing control

even as we are blown
in our dreams to vulture islands
as the cold beak of winter
tears at our rest. 

we will face the morning
with crossed fingers
hoping the road under the snow
will hold us when it’s our turn.

In my hand is a hyoid bone,
staple reference of crime shows
for the way it breaks during strangulation —

It supports the tongue
and gives us
the offer of speech —

The person who once owned this one
is silent now,
choked for some reason —

You can tell by the cracks
along the horns how it was
seized from without —

crushed by some weight
as the person stared into
another’s eyes, perhaps familiar ones —

I can’t speak myself
of any one suspect, don’t know
how to explain —

I’m stuttering now, my breath
stalled inside, preventing me
from lying to you —

My brain’s gone down into a blue hole
swirling into quiet, the lights
failing as I rasp my distress —

How this bone was ripped and crushed
is a story for someone else to carry,
not a burden, really —

a small tale of suffocation
so mundane as to be
unremarkable —

It happens every day, the
free floating bone of language itself
a casualty of others’ desires.

Before I got here,
I wanted the poems
full of feral Siberian iris and
the sword leaves of cattails,
their cotton-bomb tops
coated in tan smoke;

now I have the poems
sticky with asphalt
and cigars, Saabs
broken down on Vermont
snow trails, starfruit
on a glass plate
in a downtown bistro.

If I seem to know the world
these days, it is because
I can still sense it distantly
through its cloak of tar
and screen of clever conversation over
well-constructed food —

but there was a time
when I could stalk the woods
alone, never speaking,
filled with One Word that was enough
until I became hungry
and then I could pull white tubers from the ground
and crawfish from the streams,
build a fire and eat well,
and still never say a thing.

This is why I will not write now
of the peregrine
on the museum eaves,
knowing how little I might have to say
is true to what I have become,

for it seems that everything
that grows or soars without speaking,
is born to be itself without being told,
is now just a symbol of something I’ve lost,
and a weekend trip to the forest spells nothing
worth repeating, and I am
starving, and noisy
with the need to speak of human things
to other humans.

I am discontented
and desire only
to be alone
with the memory of how
I could have been as animal,
as mineral, as green and dumb
with simple existence as these
better beings.

Some nights,
up here on the sixth floor
in the highest loft I can afford,
I can almost believe
it was real.  My blood in my ears.
My pulse slow as constellations
turning.  My eyes fooled
into thinking I am still
seeing things as they are.

On those nights, I sleep
soundly, and the city
fades behind the curtain
of unspeakable
divinity.

It does not last.
And I do not tell a soul
of how it is.

nothing shall be untitled!

do not refuse to name it!
it will be cagey and take a name
you don’t like
if you’re not quick!

eat it before it grows
self-aware
and does the job without you!

ABSORB it into yourself
then squeeze it out and admire it!
It’s you, leftover!

let it take your own
goddamned name
if that’s all you can think of!

make part of it into your elbow knob
or perhaps a bladder cell!

you’re a discarded stick in the mud
waiting to take root
and drop fruit all around you!
here’s the chance
you’ve been waiting for!

put a name on it!
it’s not roadkill!
it’s a kid! a pet!
an ancestor! a tractor
for your field work!
dig a trench of letters!
raise up a voice to the sky
and call it something!
anything!  call it!
you’ll never get it to stay with you
otherwise!

What if
you allowed yourself
to be a fist
in the presence of
your enemies?  Not to
raise a fist, but to be one:

carry your whole being
in a ball and
resist the blows while you hold tight
to yourself?  And when
the conflict is over,
with no memory of violence
against another:  the fist
you were is gone,

you’re an open hand again.

These last few days,
this shrinking light —

the calendar promising
an end soon
to a year that seemed long
before it was near its end —
and the start of a new one.

I close my eyes
expecting no closure
from an arbitrary number
on a piece of paper,
weary of the trudging progress
that got me here.

No, I’m a bird tonight,
in accord with more certain rhythms
that will lead to renaissance,

planning to fly home
when the right moment finally comes
no matter the date,
expecting to soar
and circle, then begin the direct route
to a resting place,

a place I’ll know in my hollow bones
when I get there.