Simple Letters

The shape of each letter
is the key to the alphabet;
knitting needle.
First the book. Then the leaves
and the tip of goods and trade,
traced designs of short faces
in both directions.

Above,
three, the long way, hissing.
The west head, nine and fire.
M, the wet sound, lips together.
And a bent thread:
a vessel as small as this v.
A red vessel beside the bed,
drying flowers.

They climb up the mountain
and the mountain sends them
dreams, deaf dreams,
spewing stones.
We thought they were dead.
The smell of each flower
is the tale of the bee;
flying needle.

Below,
twisted lights trembling,
abandoned where we all sleep,
all but the trees, eating ash.
From their leaves to our leaves,
there are cities and bells.
Swollen bells.
They have the wind in their mouth.
We run among the rocks.

PASEO

2000 Lenora.
She walks the streets of somewhere
there where her mother began to walk.
In some ways it started in a pool,
a rusty pool in that flow
of varnished wood.
She is not tired yet.

1300 Virginia.
Two for one. She breathes.
She knows that pleasure, brutal
against the air, cutting an instant.
She turns around to break the body;
her arms up and down
facing each other. Wings. Leaves.
Four leaves, two halves and a pit
in the ground.
Most dense.

800 Stewart.
No parking anytime.
He has two sides.
He thinks her name is made of wax,
a relic of her parents' mold.
He remembers his parents in a mirror,
mirror with a bow on top.
A knot.

500 5th Avenue.
No turns. No turns. No turns.
She is not supposed to step
on that atmosphere of asthma;
shooting, lying there, dead,
and then starting again.
The varnish of this picture cracks.

300 4th Avenue. One way.
The rain is coming.
She buys a black jacket and hat;
a flat hat tired of gyring the circle,
to the double circle, to the hidden.
This chronic dance of ciphers
seeking numbers.

Do not block. Intersection.
The good times are now and here.
She had much to talk about.
The second one was faster than the first
or so and so.

Elevator.
The little death is a cage of water
surrounding the little earth.
Years of yellow eyes and masks
and painted bodies that form a face.

Light off. Push.
A column of blue with pulsation.
They three threw their voice to the fire
to become mute.
The sun is underground.
A garden rises.

Close door.

Maius Memento

In that year
a scroll recorded the fact.

I saw it once.
Magnificent, though in ruin.
Thick veil of gesso
in white efflorescence,
blinded by the sun and wind
and rain.

A rising snake
around the horned moon.
At the base of the spine,
a sense of vowel.
In the middle, the naming text.

  I saw it once;
fluttered from her mouth,
flew up to the tree,
here and there,
until its voice was burned
by the light and time
and me.

A square box
with sacred books,
palm leaves, clay, stones;
Flaming tongues in a watery world.

In that year
I wrote the name of my god,
and the name of the city of my god,
and my new name.

Now, I want to go home.
Too many trees, and vicious birds
preyed upon my eyes.

A sack of black
to paint the skin of my corpse.
A bed of paper;
red sun against my hair;
and these hands into the grave,
down to my dream.

Fold it! I say.
There is a temple near,
and a tomb.

Gifts for the Taking

Green orange yellow tides brought her here.
The art most ignominious, most temperate.
A principle of love
born from the rape of the air by his song.

Like a frog, incapable of turning its head,
the feline reflects in its pupils
the untiring undulation:
An echo with the rest of that first music.
It was believed that she waited on the edge of a note
to seize a similarity.

Bits of strings, twigs,
scraps of shiny paper, smooth stones.
Regretful gardens in plastic cases,
a pair of gloves, and two hands.

A hand is a sheet of flesh.

And she is a type of him
standing on the crescent moon,
 a brilliant egg of light
against a square.

The square is a type of globe
that she travels around
place to place, with a box,
the size of her confinement.
A stone box and bleached fluid
to overflow the room that holds a word.

The word is a type of bird,
a bird mended by the middle line,
joining the sky of her mouth
to the top of her tongue.
Her tongue. A type of wing.
Wet wing. Tangled tongue
trying to reach the navel
in a dance of azure invocation.

In silence, their remnants
Distant whispers of danger
from the shout of her absence.
For absence is a type of her,
making me look for him.

He is a type of me.