1.

Every day absorbed in tupperware plastic

grows satisfactorily along cellular strata,

trees sniffing a wind’s trace, the boat’s bob

on specific ripples peeled off distant

undersea indecisions. This is what we

came for, excused from our tasks by

some emergent tumult, a lazy earth

not willing to meet the word “morning,”

not knowing what to do about birdsong,

not compliant with a calendar’s grammar,

and not for nothing, but not for everything

save a sentence to dig a root to. Scissors

we made from a flag’s colorway, cave painting

the sitcoms while we take a data hit

straight into the mainline. Should all of this

be recorded in a faithful fashion, today is the sliver

you jimmy from under the nail, pus flowing

to fill the vacuous cavity of how much I miss

the scent or your skin, or the scope of another

unspoken nest of silent strands, hopeless knots,

the eye pressed against the microscope’s glass.

2.

I’m trying to remember the sense of forgetful ambivalencethat what you were always saying you recalled mentallyabout that time, that one time when things had happenedor’d been happening for probably maybe a lot longer than

any of us had realized they had or were, and even wasn’texactly quite true, that something about those eventsof that part of our lives when all those issues still feltunresolved, and even then that whatever we’d been

working out – those long foggy mornings at the placejust on the edge of what town there could be said tohave existed in that country – was as yet still unrecog-nizable as anything vaguely shaped like even a compro-

mise, something about those events held the most ill-defined form of finality, but also with some hint that wewere already well into the very first moments of somenew beginning, like people from some far-off country

boarding some kind of vessel, or not even, just enteringthe station, or not even that but just opening a suitcaseand wondering what to put into it, what to take out ofthe storage, what to do next and what had been done all

that time we were already there and so ensconced andyet also about ready to begin believing we could startplanning the eventual steps we’d need to take in order to leave but without, certainly, knowing where or what

lay ahead. In all that fog.

3.

Tired of monotonous, sloping skies, we turn our eyes to the ground and notice finally the footprints.

Curved arches relieve the earth’s pressure, broken stems leaking the night’s dew. Heeled terrain scars

us as we walk it. Irradiant phlox among the choked sewage spill. A body at rest remains at rest, a body

as a series of forms affiliated with time. A body in motion is a body stilled by cloaked agency. He went

this way, in some manner hounded. We turn our eyes to the dome above and mistake the canopy for

something more distant, don’t notice the latticed girders and I-beams lacing our fate. There becomes

relative. Distant gunfire beckoning the bored who’ve grown weary among the flowers. We track him

through the night. Other clues describe his perambles. Circumnavigating the hillocks, pausing atop a

knoll. What you want from those you know. What you got from a history of relatives. What you talk

yourself out of in the midst of pious commitment. What you put in the pot to substitute for herbs

you’ve invented in your head. A dremel to notch the tree trunk. Tie a ribbon around theology. The

skirmishing leaves devoted to the breeze. The muddy footfalls we read through shadows and fernbeds,

gently parting the underbrush so’s not to disturb the disturbances that mark the path forward we must

follow. When we catch him I will slit his throat so help me god. Tired of what low-slung branches take

the measure of how ill-fit we are for this terrain. Buttercup, mountain laurel, blackberry bushes, briar

and nettle clog the company’s progress, swishing into thigh flesh as the mumbling shushes the doves

above. Tired of birds we shoot them. Tired of sighs we slough them. Tired of typing we disappear, the

scent of burnt powder the only reminder we were, once, near.