Stone

I could say that fire is how the world breathes.
That time is the shadows of a flock of birds across me.

That I am a part of all other stones
and that we are not asleep, just listening, is true.

Hearing the water move through us
like the crystal feet of lizards in times of drought.

Like the bells of pebbles walking slowly
downhill toward the ocean’s bottom. But you

know none of this and so you don’t believe me.
Don’t know that the true name of the Lord

collects so much light to its brilliance
that he is radiant darkness, that he is gravity.

Don’t know that all the angels collapsed inward
long ago and that they are responsible

for the waves in the farthest depths of sea.
The only thing to caress the squid’s one eye.

The vacancy which absorbs the whales’ secrets,
what sound is left after we stones have had our fill.

Because we are the closest to that god. He pulls us farthest
to him. Closest in. The movement in the tonnage dark

that streams the phosphorescent plankton over us,
like wings of flame, like blessings, like peace.

Birds Have No Place Here

This is a poem about not death.
The way that doors and lights
can close that thing from our lives.
The bright order which follows
snowplows and erasers through
the night. The quiet measurements
that chiming bells make of distance.
The taste of metal flashed with sun.

But already it is obvious
that there is nothing living here.

That birds have no place here,
given their propensity to fly off,
to drown in the blue sky and fall
into secret groves of spruce.
That children cannot dwell here
goes without saying. Their faces
still so radiant and troubled
from their recent emergence.
And love. That word which forms
a funeral on the lips.

That empty house, filled with sun,
the windows open, flies buzzing.

The Desert of Open Sky Above Me

I wish my life were an almost
empty walking. Instead,

there are the sounds of birds
and insects which ricochet inside me

like light off the flat of a blade
or the flat blade of sun off snow

at noon. Inside me, there are men
in a circle throwing threats

at my chest like syringes.
I'm filled with the smell of extinct

campfires, long hallways,
and railroad tracks disappearing

into rain and smog. What I’m saying is
my mind’s a whorehouse,

a carnival of flesh, colored lights
and broken clocks, of pressures

and strange breaths against me
like ten thousand brief palms of air.

Where is the lake? Where
is the stone within which I can lie?

Let it be somewhere belowground.
The open sky fatigues me.

Here, the sun pulls everything
slowly apart. Its rays and waves

are fingers even into our hearts. You see,
there is only this reason for death:

every thing dismantles something else,
like the teeth of rain at the soil's face.

The sound of metal, grinding, the groans
of ancestors, the chest which grips the past

like a heart attack. The effort to retrace
mistakes, the waves which paw the sand.

After all this walking, this striving
to clear the sun’s bells from my eyes,

my ears, to make my head a remote branch
of a subterranean river – soon, I’m saying, -

I will be unwound like music
from a Victrola cranked too slow

in a room of gas lamps
and silent women dancing,

until their bodies are covered
with soot and the tiny splashes

of a piano upon their lips. But even then,
even after the women’s calves

and feet are still, and the birds rise
into the thick falling snow

and the insects burrow as if
preparing to become stone,

as men leave the campfire rings
one by one for the railroad tracks

which have disappeared beneath
the fingers of roots and moss' palms,

I fear my heart will not be silent.
The wind eddies in the sky above me.

Every emptiness captures sound.

The Whales Above Us

The whales above us
are sleeping where God used to.

That is what the boy
on the island said when the ocean

rose over his house.
He lives in Cleveland now, where

a woman with hair
on her chin shoves him gently

into the tub and covers
his face with a washcloth, whispering

words she stole from Job,
or Jonah, maybe, I can’t remember which.

Both, I know, were swallowed
by the terror of that God, and both, I know,

somehow emerged. But
what hope is there in a world where

love is penury and penance?
The whales above us hang in dark currents.

The woman moves her finger
across the boy’s black wrist like an eraser.

Absolution comes about
through prayer, she says, by forgetting what

was done to us, calling it
long ago and far away, where the sun

was like coals upon
the ocean’s tongue, so that it sang in words

the stars taught it.
Before the moon, that distant force, heaved

it into our hearts
and set us crashing against each other,

and the whales
took their secrets to the far corners of the sky.

Van Gogh Drinks PBR on the Paria Plateau at Sunset

Sunburned, leaning on the pickup’s hood, his eyes rip up
the stone’s red surface, the sharp horizon line.

He searches his pockets, says he has something
to send to the night-black raven which just dove

into the canyon. Finding nothing, picks up a rock
and hurls it after the bird. Light never catches up to light,

he says, then tilts his head back, gets the last piss-drop
of gold onto his tongue, and stops and stares.

Navajo Mountain over there, beyond the lake’s open eye.
Grand Staircase to the north. This desolation

of stone and piñon trees, dead cows and sky.
He fingers his ear. Wants to call some woman.

I tell him it’s three hours to a phone. Tells me
to fuck off and stalks to the back of the truck

to get another beer. Remembering the way the sun
stripped everything from the land at noon but shadow

and how he stripped naked to be more like that lake,
collecting in the sky. The way he says that eyes work.

Later I find him staring over the canyon’s rim,
down to the stream’s distant tongue of stars. Says

That’s the texture of death. That’s what that raven
sees in wind. Talks for hours about the way sand lifts off

the canyon’s walls, like a brush rising from a canvas,
and how he wants to just lie down here, among

these toadstool rocks, the sage and wind-black junipers,
though he’s afraid of being swallowed in at dawn,

says he knows that he’ll be washed, chased down
into this porous rock by the freakish rain of light and sky.