I bury my sickness at sea
and when I do so my life
splits open like/the stern of a ship.
This sea that we have
is what’s left,
and they designated this cairn
a “misfortune column,” to commemorate
the dead baker and his trees. At this
column we split off and head south through the
firs, smoke guiding the way.
It went more smoothly
then we thought, but now
I wish I had a million hands
like my mother,
in beaming light emissions.
When I left I laughed loudly, so that people in the world
might hear me—as I live on the far side of the river.
For a while I wrote down the name of every living thing I saw:
I read the rocks and their panegyrics,
I read the crickets, the dirt, snakeskins, crystal texts that planetary boned
and deloused. Pick up that flower from the table. What is it?
wisteria? lupine? You don’t know.
There is in me now a wormlike moment.
This movement makes me sweat painting clowns
into the coral beneath my feet. This fossil coral reveals small flowers
when lifted breath-swollen from a long night on my own,
a fractured graze of light which renders, ultimately, as more martinis.
The German photographer ordered one dirty, or, she was from
the Southwest, but we agreed that there is no right time
for the tide to drop, only that it just happens.
Laughing in a ditch next to my accountant
because I tricked her into adopting a mistletoe.
Clouds pass over and under, and through it,
and there was a cherry blossom, which come spring
I would weave around my head telling stories
and talking forever only a stone’s throw away from the
beginning of cinema. When a small chest,
and an attic, the rocks turned and hid their faces.
When an ocean of light or planetary body,
or a fibrous green leaf, the stars behind me grow
brighter. When that leaf, yet to receive a name,
no leopard shall discover my body. No printer
can dispose of me, who is only a wreath, and
who kept watch on this orchard, who stars
blessed his eating of peach pits, and fiery
pomegranate bodies.
