The Kingdom In constant shiver and hunger in tatters in envy and bliss the kingdom of weeds laps the blond edge of field the careful square cleared years ago of boulder and stump so gold grass might thrive Apostle here is your opened place visible as wound here beside it the burred green world of thistle and burdock of knots uncut saplings’ sutured branches vigilant thicket toward which your eye longs where to be hidden is to be kissed in secret and never to name its tangle though you may name its threads
Notebook of Air And after, outside? Dusk of not-summer, not-yet-fall, the blue-quiet trees afloat in the slightly paler evening that surrounds and allows them to be. And you? You came asking to be changed, a secret even from yourself. And after, even beneath the enormous thunder of city bridge: crickets, calling the night back to itself. As twirling in circles calls the body back: green skirt lifting away from thighs, oceans of air between cloth and skin. Now you will keep asking whatever you can of the one window open above the alley, its translucent curtain saturated with lamplight, as if allowing itself to be harmed in the gentlest of possible ways.
Litany (California) By blue, fog, lamp. By wing-bone and taillight. Streets we both walked a decade apart. Sometimes jasmine’s steady candling at dusk. Sometimes the nine sentinel palm trees. By the great fires farther north. By the continent’s farthest edge. By sparrows chattering from the depths of the rosemary hedge, by plums splattered on sidewalks. Burned circle of skin inside the wrist: farther north, the burning shifting in the sky. Plums with their secrets, their wet and tender. Over and over, a longing to equal their softness. How much becoming it takes. Streets we both walked, heat map of bodies moving. During the long rains, any brightness. Taillights like blurred rubies, climbing the hills. Any brightness to call you close. Cluster of nine palms, visible from blocks away. Crown of fronds, calling. By crown and calling. By the summer lake’s dried-up husk. Shifting palette of the hills, the ocean swallowed in fog. Streets we both. That even concrete might retain a tracing. Map of bloom and fruit. Map brighter where bodies overlap. Remember? One lamp turning its window truer. Rosemary flowers recalling the robes of saints. By the crush of their leaves between fingers. By carrying the scent until it fades. By the becoming. Streets we both, plums opening their skins. By softness. How to equal it. By tender skin inside the wrist, rising beneath the burned place.
