I’m not clear
How to arrive again from where I find
Myself. Each utterance a potential weight,
A creational gravity.
      There’s a warning in it, I feel sure.

To separate from the old feeling seems
A harder act to carry out; an
Invisible hand that puts life into our pages,
And the living as anti-
Romantic as the dreaming is romantic.

I feel autumn strain again, despite
Spring’s closeness. Today

I saw the field:
It was empty, partially brown in shadow
Under a hill.
Made me want these things,
To arrive at a warmth.

It was the two geese, however,
That made me want to say.

Calls to me beyond the weeping border. The river sliding down to bury itself in the Atlantic, then highways spread, networking themselves out across the continent in a web designed to catch and hold us to the machinations of capital and collateral. We are shunted and filed, numbered, indexed, made to mortgage.

And all the while wild grows out around us, darkening trees erase the streetlights and gather to cover me in my house, a little gold against the night.

There are fields and dreams about wild herds – once the corn is gathered the hay is baled and rolled. There are cartoons of these things: the soiled colors overtake every nuance that we’d understood and replace the varied organs under flesh with the composite derived from image and speculation. Every eye makes a symbol, all the leaves sugared by snow dissolve in their cinema.

I walked in the early morning, the sun running its fingers over the mountaintops across the river, and knew that this was the way we had been made to be.

On a hill the city walled itself and declared all the cosmos therein.

In a bed bodies rising build a window in place of eyes, hands, faces.

And again:

This dream-domain, an ideal mire that hums and sings from beyond the border I know well – the river flushing itself out into cold mornings and pushing up from below the dirt. If this is a picture then it can only move and breathe in the way we have burned the world into our brains, our teaching. Falling furious over us the darkness that is each day upon the paved parkway

and gathers me up into its arms; the lies that get told by the
face lodged in the window and heavy as an inkwash drowning the grass. Once cut, it prickles and pushes and aches to say its lastness, an eruption that gags and slaughters. I lay in the field once and slept under the shearing tractor, pushed forth out on the land, away from the cities I’d known, from the rivers and hills.

This cosmos called for me, reconnoitered the menu and pointed a place as alternative to embrace. Each hilltop crumbled, a joyful plunder to the seabed. The seasons blinked and there was snow pushing away the past, all the story that had lain thick on my tongue.

The horses beat out the rhythm that we needed, that the motor charmed, and threw us across the plum night. Lamps bleached the sunset and scrub bushes kept pace with the flashing aureoles signaling caution.

There would be a zone of disappearance that would define a new border, borderless day: flooded dirt dreamed and pavement cracking under revolutionary forecasts. The innocent fortune told: You long to see the Great Pyramids in Egypt. And so it was that the river was diverted and the dark washed light.

The water splits us too, the thousand bodies press
against your tent’s flap

where once I was softly admitted into
the wet art of boundaries

was made allegiant by blood to the chain
of blood that stretched out

within and beyond; the humid walls erected
only to be torn aside again.

At a moment of crisis you call to share
triumph, to hold it over me.

*

Even unseen, another version of who we were
when we were

but only for the briefest moment. A golden sea
pounds down on our feet

and unstill the air breathes into our mouths and
blows out through our ears.

We can get closer still – on the edge of desert
I stood and almost admired

but before it could happen the whole fragile scaffolding
would have to fall.

*

Satellite passes you to me again, a plea from
outside my service area.

Late calls hovering about my ears.

Four years and I still cannot stand your face.
Soldiers stand around and smoke

after appearing on television. Following the orders
that number the days – one today, two yesterday,

and so on. A shattered wall, courtyard strewn with left-
behinds, a hundred thousand

bodies tight in restricted water. Economy of lost promises:
splitting a single howl a dozen ways.

*

The war continues unabated while you talk,
we are two criminals standing watch

over the worst broken pledges – the fiction
of healing, the fact

of pleading for silence. Suddenly, the sun
gives way to stars.

On television a parade – a firefight – and bodies eating into
the only home I’d call a body

whispering out from darkened corners,
offering the opposite of kiss.