Exiter
A sword is a bird or a room
with no children
A rook is an ironwork
oil-slicked runoff
*
The lake’s new shore, the hunch of a fish
betrays a low profundal zone
Gestation in the distance
a dozen green-lipped shells
Each summer more water lifts
out of the water. In the vanishing body
our rock is left looking
more and more like itself
Prospect
I was promised a Q and six fake waterfalls
In the middle of my spleen snow coats
a mini-lake a wire fence
sags to the earth
Your bad back curved to the bed’s edge
in what on the path is hard and fallen full of pockets
of air Mouth blue
I’ve given up Up north a ways
off-leash dogs race down a blonde hill
Vellum in the dry grass split ends in the underbrush
Still I listen for water the hard rind of wanting
harder than knowing a year
from a year
Address
Here is Seneca’s sum of buttons
the block’s long zip and sloshy pulse—
How to listen as the body blares
streaked with a pitch of old cells.
When my room is as dark
as the city allows, I let myself forget the room.
Strain the outline of the rubberized lily
that in my first years of becoming
became a gradual nothing, a thin shape
before sleep. A formative memory:
Led out to the school’s wet lot, a temp
had us lie down in November
on the concrete. Sausages rose
from the basement window, the birds
were eating silently. My cilia were still as grass.
The earth, he said, is spinning now.
We are upside-down. I’ll be back. Recall where
you are in relation to sound.
