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the soft white buried sprout, the clock in which time sits like a prisoner, which time sits here like. you found a path, so followed it. for every moment, you are the moment doubled.
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you were struck by a lightening of words, and wanted to say everything. being the architect of your own seraphic collapse, you risk tearing the pages when you turn them. i am growing from the ground up. sapling, whereabout, a few living blossoms. we understand each other.
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when you are sleeping, you are able to stand outside logic. or you sit inside a different validity, at least, lay your head inside a book and recite its scenery like psalmody, your yawning forest a silhouette of becoming lost. landscape rotates on an internal axis, your sugared mountains pulsing an edge, lung-colored, illegible, shaped like the inside of a dark idea. when you open your mouth, what flies out?
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only as long as we have no history, we look backward, pluck a bewildered wildflower and wait. in this way we document the moment, in this way we stand inside of it, pushing our breath at its edges that separate us from so many sleeping others. we escape hours, glint, shifting, sifted like salt through the gaps in our warm grasp of fingers.
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you say home and point away, beyond the surface of the window. you try not to be a dangle of barnacles. you try not to be trapped in water. the gentle neck of your old map is bent, a fog gathers in the valley between mountains, and the mountains breathe in and out with the supposition of dreamers, clouding your feathered bed with the coming of morning.
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haunting your heart whole, your voice rises in silence with roses and mud. this is how you challenge the shadow of the bridge, water-shaped, pennyweight. hybrid wild daffodils leap up from the ginger indents of your apricot feet, looking, seedling, the soft ground where you fashion a path. hollow and lucid, your eyes filled with spilling, cracked open like eggs. this is how you learn. this is how you are loving yourself loveless.
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unscrolling history, you sift your dream for reasons. i carry photos of my absences, fashion them in a flower with bright lemon petals and a green tunnel for a stem. wave it at the sparkling skyline like a weapon. "how will you begin?" you asked, before now. my belly is a botanical garden, i said, a goldfish fountain for lost coins, glinting in some underwater nowhere. sometimes one wish at a time, and sometimes all of them at once.
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your body is like making a pathway through the forest. you sing a ladder down and climb inside. time is heavy but we weigh the same in feathers. against the backdrop of sunrise, pine bough's needled silhouettes edged in light frost like powdered sugar, a dusting of pollen, how coral release their eggs into a warm current. you lust for warm mornings, long to leave the window open, stand on one foot at the threshold of summer, wearing your nightgown like thin milk, like an aura of all lost things soft and dried, rippling on the line of recollection.
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you can't cut water, your insides blossoming, bolting, dropping seeds. your body shifts through seasons with the moon and the tides. if you drink enough rain, straight from the tap of the sky, will something flower? my belly is a dreaming city, you say, a wet architecture of gardens, i sleep near a sinkhole to somewhere else. in dream, i plant the seeds that fall. in autumn, i watch them go under where i wait all winter, clean and quiet, holding my breath.
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words can't accomplish your wanderings. you put it in quotations. apples blush when you walk by, your mouth watering. both before you and behind you is listening to snow falling at night. you look away, hiding your smile, becoming a closet with two doors, two voices on a page. i wonder how different it is to learn something when you're only sugar and skin, lacking the words to learn it with.
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prayer-flag for a new image, you come from the hills, you spout long vowels into the breath of the city, trim the tall wind like so many ghosts of dandelions, bluebirds, your mouth makes an empty shape of kissing. i go through your long words and find replacements in another language, bending my mouth to imagine. through with asking, we spit our small, old ghosts onto a lingering slipstream. watch them loop up in flutter like bright flowers gone to seed, dreaming the hollow of warmth between us.
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you collect my voice in scraps like newspaper cuttings. brightly cut grasses a disarray of dialogue, our flimsy history riddled through with soft holes in speech where we pull apart like wet paper. my gray-haired words, each for all their limping, make it across the gully between us later, heaving bright-eyed like elephants to the other side of an hourglass. as breathless and dumb and beaming as stars.
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you hold on to your idea of affection like an ancient rainy sidewalk book. hard covers closed, threadbare at the corners. you consult it later, flipping pages like copper coins in the warm cup of your palms, one so worn you can't tell a face from a building. eyes from architecture, you look out like you're looking out a window, raindrops smear me like a city that fills the distance between us, pulling the sky down with gravity, boundless, unapologetic.
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you sing, you read, you listen, you look. you rearrange the pieces, little water-filled jars of stolen flowers, a heavy copper heart, a poem about birds, framed and faded. photo of a moveable city with all her drawbridges lifted like the trumpeting trunks of elephants. a miniature canon. a cut piece of garnet, violet in the dim desk-light. in the window, a glass bird, so blue when the sun shines through at dawn, as if you were afloat beneath a glacier, some oceanic dream, a return, a charm for lost days found, you make a connection by color and something lights up, you move on. you tie yourself to what becomes untied, listening for cracks. it's your way of being in the world.
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motionless and unnamed, perched in your birdless aviary, a lofty idea freezes on a branch-tip, hangs there in an icy dangle. your feet grumble along the ice, long for friction to keep from a slip. you clutch a flush cloud high above the clothesline, trying to lift. your fists curled in tight, bright knotted petals like roses, knuckles stuck out make a mountain range, hard bounds of bone cold against a frosting of yellows and blues, our flesh-tinged peaches of morning.
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rain pools and pushes you to abstraction, like evening does. all your specific boundaries blur, edges of unlike things rub together like stray cats, rub the city skyline new and sparkling. this is an analeptic drink for dreaming. a teaspoon filled to spilling with rainsounds when they hit the window, reflect everything falling at once. even our breath in and out, and the words that linger there and what they hold. permeable vessels with no tops or bottoms. i hold the teaspoon out the window, reach past a stormcloud to pull a star down, drop it into the spoon before i drink it to feel it spark on my tongue like a broken memory, then fizzle out.
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by what lost reason you bend your steps, by what gnarled footpath through what forest, alive with listening. i'm here. in this moment, in this, one cupboard of your story, my body displaced by a medicinal dream. the walls of the forest make a drape around your singing limbs, conceal you from all else under a snap of twigs and dried leaves. stray feathers are a black flip indigo in a broken shaft of sun sinking. you make up so much when you're asleep, you want to say, your mouth with its edges like damp paper, soft and blank and folded, without the words to leap from, your lips having lost them for not looking.
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your body is a living apothecary shop. in the city of lost steps, you stand on a corner squinting into my sun's pink plummet. a breeze dips in from the mountain, some dark fold swings open, and little jars fill you. half-empty with bright sprigs and tinctures, hidden elixirs, you weather a botanical dream tucked against the roots of your chest, despite your lack of light. when i ask you what you have for being lost, either impetus or antidote, you look at me with a last glint of your snowy somewhere falling through your eyes, like pearls slide off a string into a glass of water. you turn back toward the horizon, saying nothing, having dissolved your voice in my jar of words.
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trickled ceremonial of daylight through cypress, knotted arms that reach away in one direction. on one budding branch, a solitary bird perches, to swallow the seeds of an imaginary flower. real petals pale, falling around your feet, you take a deep path over the old wooden footbridge, you move under a cloak of leaves, become a breath beneath the canopy, your departure sealed by a sediment of ghosts. this old bridge is the shape of your heart, this path the shape of my body, crossing it. this is our moon shot, starboard, impossible bottle, history of a myth system listing to port. this is where we linger, in a slippery drift, where you look and i look where we close my eyes looking, where the starfall glints silver, where we all become water, where water becomes a cloud becomes a dream, which the star-bellied bird, leaning high on the horizon, displaces.
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