false cognates

ellen lost her little dachshund
burrowed under the fence, up and left of his own volition
everything spilling out from that moment
her vow of celibacy
blank eyes blanket statements
the twins the tennessee commune with
the wild cows and the washed out road
the needy dogs the one in heat
the philosopher husband, the
sweet cold spring in a hollow of cotton mouths
me a question mark and a vision
of earth of basalt energy and loamy lines

flowing back to

the thick black spool of suwannee

the whooping cranes, the cypress knees, 

flat and ascendant spanse of prairie

i want to live backward forward and laterally

careful cleft of a life lived in two halves

before and before

after after

look i don't have a single answer and

i didn’t love any more then or 

any less now

like anything, an acquiescence

crown molding spirit to ribcage

i think to be honest but spill out past praise

but then is the pressure point of praise not something

altogether human

enrapt, fuming

i'm not sure when ever
i'll hug rob who for months on end lugged
around a taxidermied lynx named wilhemina
how you had to ask any questions to rob through wilhemina
and wait for her to answer, until he traded her to someone
on craigslist for a homehewn mandolin and a fistful of spliffs

To be honest –

Love has always been perfect, 

and each incarnation leaves me 

closer to some ideal at the intersection 

of brokenness and power, maybe emptiness? 

but always shattered and spread thin but also 

wrapped up but also like all of those pieces 

of glass at the bottom of the recycling bins:

covered in filth and sticky, matted to the bottom, 

precarious to pick up always lingering for that day

when you finally get around to just admitting, yeah – 

its emptiness alright but it’s meant so much – 

in a convex way? 

Perfect lovers help me trace 

this convex emptiness  bearing down on us 

beyond gravity and other presences; 

Cling to this invisible dome with me, 

magnets staking claim and 

holding up your letters and bad drawings 

before bearing to much and sliding down, 

only toothpicks and quarters wrapped in dollar 

bills seem to stick and stay up there forever. 

The Mark of Time

My clothes have gone around, my leather jacket has come back,

it still fits I'm so vain, dozens of shop windows can attest

my body remains in fright.

If I stay out of the light, my face also seems familiar,

I'm essentially the same, then, and whenever a  distant

friend of friend similarly goes round, they visit me through

slimy screens and no filter can smudge them as 

anything but carrying warnings to my past.

Squak Mountain

Silly me, I had forgotten

a forest is not simply
many trees standing together 
without roads, 

                        and a person is not 
just the collection of stories 
they spin about themself, 

and a poem– 

                    a poem is something other
not just lines of words arranged 
from one place to another, beating 

Annie Dillard was right about the light 

the light that streamed 
towards me, silver speckled 
through neon maze 
and bouncing off
the surfaces of things shimmering
then sinking ashen with 
the shameless wind, opened 
a door for a moment