1.
Let me begin with the cerebellum.

Let me begin with a crowd.

An undulating mass, redolent of
a cornfield under wind. The zephyr
of sound emanating from their
periphery. Solidifying to a
cataract as you wade in.


2.
Your absence as metaphor

Become a presence, the vacant space
I imagine reserved for what we do not share

Poorly cooked meals, and cheap wine
Planned transcendence that fails to transcend
The elliptical bickering, signifying motion,

away, away, away from reductive meadows
into the switchback roads, the ascending fog

Shared looks over books

and the grimace of unwashed feet

3.
I curate evasive passion, our hands
dancers out of step.


4.
And I am faced with your presence
now on the threshold of its physical
leave. The transient rapture, your hair
on my hands and your hands on my
shoulders. Too much for one moment.
That lingering scent of rain which never
fell. The lead heavy light weighing on
every ounce of matter. The grass and
the grass roots, and the generations of
trees that scoff at our kinesis. The
subterranean insects and the subterranean
elements, soil and clay and molten rock
and nickel. The tortuous stories we both
harbor. The lives we don’t intersect. Oil
sheening the gulf. Soldiers ambushed
in the desert. The minor epochal shifts,
China consuming more carbon. Bombs
being developed in labs. A warlord and
prophet at large in the Congo. Some-
where, a call to prayer. Somewhere, a
last rites. Somewhere a meal, a marriage
ending. Somewhere, a consummation.
A billion billion stars blindly expanding.
Somewhere, a star expending its breath.
Here, your hair on my hands. Your chin
in the nape of my shoulder. So much
inconsequence eviscerating my life.


5.
You pass through the abraded mountains
to the undulate heartlands, the lands built
on glacial time.

The wimpled green and furious lapis, the
million fine variants of color as they wed
under wind. The shifting morality of beauty,

stark, now serene. Inveterate in my soul,
this reverence. Ancient and quiet. It is the
unquestioning of presence, dance

in whispers, the abeyance of your itinerant
heart. This fragile resplendence cannot endure
in the furtive folds of the fields.

And imagining your movement away, into
the deep hollows of my memory, I think
you might finally understand:

the secret dialect of my childhood;
my lovely, lilting soul.


6.
A mystery, a mystery.

People are in their human dramas.

A man and his sister argue over an inheritance.

A café owner flirts impotently with a housewife.

A sultry young woman is smiling at me.

Children clamor for water ice.

I have grand designs, parapets and balustrades
and flying buttresses of poetry. But the body of
life is the mortar, the pragmatic brick.

A single mother is in the garden, uprooting.


7.
I think, at times, I have learned something
while losing you. That our hearts know more
than we can perceive. And this is a kind of
faith, one we must find. It’s a peculiar
courage, to trust your own hymns. To even
hear that singing above the cacophonous world.