Because Love levels

—Lisa Robertson

or is it nothing but the wind

—Genya Turovskaya

soft word ....... say .. boy

say ..... glass

............................................. acorn

prune jasmine and listen

.............................. for queerer

sound ... watch winter moon

metamorphosis ........ from dark

to sickle to circle .... each measure

a reminder of a form and another form

nearby .... in my mind

you are a boy in a long skirt with your

hair down I can hear your voice now

too .......... compression (Sunday)

of the space between this & there

falling was always

the feeling, and now it’s

coming down so heavily

the sky is piling on

the ground where a scale

returns to level. The chromatic

footfall that’s never any

harder for the knees. A note

finding foothold, radial scope, paw

prints and giant’s steps

fee .. fi .. fo .. fum .... this sharp

air soaked & soggy love

damp is the resonance of wet’s

weightiness that hangs on a branch

one week in winter pressing the dogwood

tree over further into gravity & dormancy

a dome cradling time and a bloom

of snow crane lower still & there’s you

underneath distracted by poems

my love is blunt and a kiss

without discernable edge is a moment

of porous exertion ............... poorest self deliverance

laborless and worth its levitating weight

(mid-week) ....... Accept a soft task of solar lysis

a sudden pass through the periphery of a flame

I will be of use to you in this strange and quickening

craft

North America’s smallest woodpecker

(hides in the dogwood bloom)

on sun cracked snow, on train tracks swaying arrival,

on a steel

frame of wires

.....

(the improbability of a flock of doves perched all

on a single bull’s horn)

(a haze of cosmic dust) ... Venus in Taurus

(an absolute stillness of enormous mass, so as not

to tilt the paradox)

.....

I can’t hold onto such a heavy book ..... too life dense

it just freaks me out

.....

cup a hand of staples ........ a web of threads

blots of ink stains that cover my bed

silver-blue cataract the city is flush

with quiet and fat in its shadows

dramatic resonances February is cratered

by the moon an entire season

when the sky is a shade globe of sleep-eyes

Let’s walk to where the ice fissures on the lake ..... Light

etched in the surface of a nearly transparent

lens ..... Now we are reachable

in the most remote ways

.....

(sunset) but it’s the morning when the sun settles

(and watch it from your bed) .. hidden

.....

witching window that the dawn hurries out through

then that these are gradient days

and slower even than the breath it takes

sensing the texture of what snow will openly claim

gradual evening of a week’s end

.....

frayed yellow absolute value of no use

time’s just wrinkling in dappled sheets & wrapped

with stripes, with gentle increments of stress

.....

origin of every image is a shutter nearly touching

the smallest space of now & then another

.....

between you and me it’s a scarf’s length

a nape without contours

or focusless complexion of a kiss