There's much to write in the Book of Rememory,
but the censors are all sleeping in their darkened attic rooms

so they cannot hear the way the bats above them wake
into what they imagine as yesterday's night. First they roll

their small and avian shoulders back, the ball in socket
sounding like a violin we once heard far down the block

walking long ago at night. Perhaps you did not hear it.
I thought it was scribing all my life out into the sky

and because the city's broad pink haze had blocked them out
no stars shone and so I reached your hand, but mine was so slow and heavy

it was as though it were a boat I had to row great distances,
half again as far, and half again, again, until you reached me.

It was, I think, then I loved you first. Perhaps you did not hear it.
But in my head I became the one white alpine gentian,

scaled and reptilian, Van Gogh walked down from the mountains with,
his ear cupped to its petals, then painted again and again

as all the suns that went into it. Convinced he had it right.
The gentian on the window sill, bowed and brown, blessing him and weeping.

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.

Gravity

What he said to himself was
distill it. That is, remember it.

When the clouds came from out of the face
of the stars looking something like
her face, he stood in the pour, in the rain,
trying to puzzle it out as it shifted,

thought of the child growing inside of her.

Found himself looking at the moon
in a puddle later. And the moon
looking differently radiant.

Wondering how it would fill him now.

Then watched the moon coming in on the rain
through the soil flowing into
limestone chambers at the heart.

Hearing that silver motion
coming into that sudden quiet
and settling out in small ripples
and vast darkness.

You want angels, too?
: The blind of wings slashed through
by wind and light like bars. Yes, like bars.
As though everything was abruptly solid.
: The flames against the tree’s
rough bark. Around the tree’s black bark.
: What wind, what light. : I think
I never saw the light like this
in the Cordillera. When I didn’t know
what young was. : How I knew
the girl in Tinqui by the way
she held blue gentians and let the goats
nuzzle her small, hard palms. :
That she could not speak by the way
she loved the ravens and still
did not envy them the sky or flight, :
but saw them in their stuttered luster,
their wings hard against the light
like bars across the wind. :
Like time, a stick across
the slatted world. : What
wind, what light. And wings, fire. :
These blazing parishioners of life.

Texas Porchlight

Sometimes she wears her beauty like a scar
whose story is obscure and violent.
As though within the light of her cheekbones
the gold east Texas porchlight on the man’s
breaking skull still radiates. As though
the yellow of the rooms within the house
where she stood watching the bat come down
inside the circled men or the sound
of that opening in the hot, locust night
is in her mouth, behind her thin carved lips.
But this is not about pity nor are her eyes,
which glisten here like the stones sang
in the stream behind her house
in Oregon in winter. Where the rain
made the whole land hymn as it decayed.
And this is not about echoing, nor
how water carries all the ridge
downhill with it. It is about the power
of powerlessness, the way things form
from what flows through them. Not
the ridge coming down, but the banks
standing up. The secant life, tangent
dreams, the geometry of witness,
the geography of loss building within,
pushing its terrific, silencing beauty out.

Schrodiger’s Cat

In Utah, there are men trapped belowground
as machines bore down toward them
and the newspapers shriek and oscillate.

Once, I would have said that both
not only could be, but actually were true:

that the men were standing in the inhaling dark
watching the blooms of their headlamps flail
against the earth’s constriction,

and that the crush of coal and stone
had already consumed them
until we could carve back that mouth.

Expose the breath or the black.

But now we know that the star
goes out after thirty million years
of light traveling toward a stop.

Its last ripple laughing at nothing.

Not even our faith in it. Not
the possibility of return, or of orbits
not ending, of circles beginning.

God’s death, they say, was long ago.

The sun continues its strange wobble west
at its long fixed distance, and night comes.

In Utah, there are men belowground.

Flowers of flesh, flowers of bone.

Semaphore

It now was winter and the moths were all dead,
just when he had need for their metaphor.
He and the woman in the yellow kitchen,
unable to hear themselves. Beating
at something between them.

If it were summer, he thought,
this would not be happening. The moths
would be at the windows, their wings
clapping the glass, antennae scraping the panes
at the unspeakable distance between
themselves always and the light.

And he would point to them and she
would understand, would look up from the knife
and cloves of garlic on the cutting board,
those bulbs like fire across the wood,
and would understand.

Behind them, the stars ticked down the sky
in their nightly failure. He noted their semaphore:
thin bands of light, combustion. And he went quiet.

House Rock Valley, AZ

The white breath starting in only
after the dark exhale of birth. That’s
what day is here, and what night is

while in the tongue of sand, in the dry wash
the tamarisk lifts its thousand snarls
to the condor in the sky. Which hangs

like death’s finger against the blue, then falls
inside you like a stone. And at night,
in that push the dark makes out all night

the kangaroo rat follows the path
he makes. Like the river singing
about sacrifice. Against the way

the borders of our lives press in
on us all day. The antelope strung
through the barbed wire fence.

Rockfall. And the wind rising
above the sound of the highway,
which is like the feel of saltbrush

across your fingers. Though I want it
to be the hair on a dead cow. The cleft
air, the shadow beneath the falling block

of stone. The sound of gravity and ruin.
Because this place claws me open wide. Cleaves
me apart like prayer, like breath. And rolls

the boundaries back. The Colorado River
over there. The Vermilion Cliffs. The Kaibab
at my back, in its constant lying down.

Abandonment

Sometimes at night, the aspen leaves tick
like the fingernails of criminals

finally lowered from the scaffold
onto the bright-lit concrete floor

of the chamber. And what they say
is something about forgiveness

and how it keeps unfolding us
like the wings of crushed birds

on desert highways in the wind,
which comes out of the sky

where the night also dwells.
And both the night and the wind,

which are sisters, and who constantly
betray each other – one to morning,

one to distance – each eventually
reaches us, finally touches us

with their long hands and lucent nails,
as though to bless us but never

keep us, never hold us, letting go
and letting go, and us falling

and falling silent, mouths open.
All this, the leaves make clear

in their leaving, beneath the moon
and the distant stars, which struggle

to hold down the black like heads
of tacks or gleaming nails, but even they

are already dead or on fire.

Revelation

It is waking in the night to hooves
around your head stamping sand,
it is the black-gritted groans uttered
which ratchet the terror in your chest,
it is the silence which between plumed breaths
constructs an altar out of the blackness
until the hooves cast against the buried rocks
like prayer are only sparks like prayers
returned, it is the elk pawing for water,
frantic against the drought-bright stars,

this faith in the inhuman,
religion of stones and wind.

Beggary

In winter, it’s true, sometimes we dressed
our days like small fires fed meagerly

the low clouds giving us silence and rain
and us bowed by it into ourselves,

into gnashing the few bright wings and red
we found flying in the dark between us like words

while the river murmured on behind us
like two stone-drowned lovers breathing,

but I lived up here with you with the sun’s face
lying down into your lap, unhesitating

as it descended through the sundial firs in love
with the timbre of its own splash on your flesh

the way I loved it too, but listen: the waters
are emptying themselves from beneath our feet

and the owl is navigating the space between
the trees coldly, knowing we are leaving,

so remember the way the hummingbird
was a lamp to the summer ceiling one day

and then sitting in my astounded hand
between us, its heart the wind within fire,

as though everything was combusting at once,
that all was flame and feather and sun,

as though here, at the end of all this,
we could still somehow receive

such a tremendous wealth.

Arachne

As she spoke to him on the phone
he killed spiders. She urged him not to.
She was moving out in four days. Leaving
the legs of rain behind to run the window’s face.
Coming to him in Arizona. Where the wind
made promises of barrenness in the sky
and kept them. But she was pregnant.
It was the abstractness that frightened him.
The thought which had become unreal.
It was Socrates who ruined Athens after all.
Then she asked to stay and he watched
something slide between them, black
and sideways. He did not raise his hand.

The Garden of Longing

The garden is a spinning clock.
And clocks have always noted
loss. The poppies, risen like suns
from some underworld of hate
have fallen back by now and grapes
adorn the trellises like stars

of blood upon the surfaces of muscle,
swelling. And soon they will
be consumed. Spit out into a darkened
bowl and washed into the bowels
of earth, a river gathering up the stones
into its mouth and mumbling them out
onto the violent bottom of the sea.

While somewhere a violin is playing
a picture of your face, the high
cheekbones rising like mist off of the bow,
a morning gathering in your lips
like dew holding down the sun
on every blade of grass or trembled

note, or bells in dry hot noon plazas
in some murderous, desert south, the peppers
grown like fire into their tortured shapes
and hung already upon the house like the hides
of slaughtered animals, dripping red
into the yellow day, as a woman

crawls from the doorway bleeding,
not speaking, not moaning, or weeping,
even beneath the thick feet of bells
treading through the air, over her rusted
vines and ruined garden, her love
far away and inside something

beating her, erupting within her
at noon, black flowers that grip
the last of the dirt hurt her
beneath her aching breasts.