​there was a time
when I would pluck
a star out of the sky
and place it on your head
it would singe my fingers
a little, it was smaller
than I imagined
as wonderful as a seed.
these days my giving 
is more generous
and consists entirely
of pointing: look at
the cardinal burning a hole
through the trees
look, how the 
moss slouches heavy 
against the northsides 
leaning away from 
confusion, look here,
the blueberry, ripe, 
generous as water
and the water without end
strewn everywhere
(look! look!)
as if by chance
if you can imagine
no other cause
a constellation of miracles
yours for the taking 
(including the small 
parenthetical of my heart) 
if you’ve mastered the 
language of yes.
​

when I was a little confused
I was most irredeemable 
but when truly lost
my body blown out
upon the stones of it
— whatever betrayal
whatever crushing
rectangle, whatever
assassinated bird--
I’d found I’d returned
to the old room of
my heart to discover all
the doors unlocked
as if no one had ever
left home, and the
illumination coming through
the windows, tender,
as in morning
or before evening,
the to-ing and fro-ing
hours of life and living
creatures and electrons
my bed still there, a bare patch 
of ground by the woodstove
—simple but worn soft
through suffering--
a cup of tea, still hot
the writing desk
(waiting like a butler)
from which I have always 
been able, before nightfall, 
to compose a poem and die
and in dying, the words
like a coin placed between 
my lips, awaken.
​

​night, I am listening to 
the way you tiptoe around
my bed and cast your 
spell on the exhausted land. 
I'm lying awake waiting for you
to say something wicked
or to whisper me the secret
that erases the orange face
of the day. eventually you'll win
and fold your blanket of eyelids
over me. I've been trying to
trick you for fifty years:
just once, to catch you winking.
​

​November deranges me but by December
I am ready to really die
not just ram my face through a window
it’s a transition, a kind of
lycanthropy how madness reaches out to exhaustion and
exhaustion to silence
and silence with its old man’s face
opens the door to the garden
on the south side of the house
that the talkers and thinkers can’t find.
there is a key, and that
key is the moon and whatever
it does to you to get you to open your mouth
and spit out the hornets. 
Fall is a good time for it.
the shadows put their burly
shoulders to the wheel.
time to fire the lawyers and stop pretending: 
you can’t avoid the charge of insanity 
​if your goal is to cut off your head
and place it beneath your feet.

​be calm love. 
don’t stop singing. 
true, it’s the season
of Neptunian winds
and disorderly zeros
and yet someone
is lighting a fire
not the metaphorical 
kind but the flame
itself, someone is cooking
dinner and there are 
hands on the line--
laundry line that is,
not the golden chain 
that pulls the damned 
from hell. 
someone must keep
doing these things
and fall in love
with the small.
don’t pretend they don’t 
have meaning, that the
low singing can’t 
hold a tune. even the
heart, vast redness
which we ascribe all
our super powers to
moves like a bee in 
the dark meadow of our
chests, an ordinary
bee, humming to
an ordinary task.

I have grown tired of words
imagine that, me, a poet
it’s true, have had my fill--
don’t think evilly of me
it’s not like we’re starving
between breaths
not like we are not so full
of them our brains don't outweigh 
our hearts not like we have not
devoured them like potato
chips been force-fed them 
and gagged on them as if
on dogmeat or worse not like 
the words do what
we tell them too anyway
unruly things full of dangerous 
objects like the slippery S
of insinuations or the jagged I 
prone to impaling--
seriously, goddamn that I
and the horse it rode in on--
no, we’re lacking nothing
in the Sentence Department
the Bureau of Statements
we’re so full of them
they’re leaking into outer space
polluting the silence
of the moons, bouncing back
radioactive as a rotten sun’s
mind and the trees, who do
well enough sans adjectives,
shiver. I’m searching for 
a new language that doesn’t
require them, an essay
of pure, tactile devotion, a species 
of love, speaking of which, yes
I could never wrap my tongue
completely around. 
​