lxxxxvi.

if the world won't wait, for any
intake of breath, passes fast
over each exhalation,

set it aside, remember
it runs fast, but it's
welded to what's been spoken

will wield and will cleave
and twist, on the axis
of the word, inevitably

what's left will become, suddenly
the course of events will always
fall under and reverse it's polarity

people who say the direction
and the motion are environmental
conditions are lying to you

lxxxxiv.

there is no pattern in the stars
hazy over the lights
here, it's necessary
to rely on the human voice, however
muted and only dimly lit

lxxxxiii.

the crack in the night--
the light tears
over the peaks, later,

--is when to draw a breath.
during the day, history tangles
with history and the current,
moment, tangles and twists, and
fills to the banks.

put a breath in the tangle of reeds
by the edge of some other river,
near the peak by some other valley,
under the verge at some other field,

in the thick vegetation growing off
of the drainage, they hold

what you can't draw as the day is
passing, what you can't show in
the street or the hallway, to preserve

these things from what would confirm
its blindness, by violence, if necessary
the past is an entrance to an alley,

and the alleys run through the city
until they fall to brush, and ditch,
and levee--to gravel, to gully,
shadow and haze at the horizon, to
loading bays and wire fences
to alley and alleys, again,

the veins that run behind the face
of the world, can hold your breath
in their junctures--the undone future's
the entrance to an alley

lxxxxii.

what was lost; is lost
unable
to restore it,

she said something
was growing
deep below the asphalt

in the ground, skew to
it would rise
through the sidewalk,

in the gap of sky between
the branches,
coalescing past it what

the sky holds will not
touch it
--and she was afraid,

--she fell across the threshold
where she went, I don't know,

but I see the echo, far-off
in other place, coursing,
through the network--I see

it close up, in half-filmed eyes,
there is a tree on the flat by
the rise above the valley, it spreads

alone above the sage-brush, waving
in the wind, green and thin--it frames
the mountains; leaves flickering

like all trees, it is connected only
by its taproots, and what the water
carries to them, but in a stand,

you think they have company, what
living teaches are further examples, what
words are--

--can be carried where words are, even
where they are unexpected, like
water, like wind--they navigate courses

and small expanses, broadly.

what you remember until you know it
will crack on other memory
remembered until it is unknown

carried forward--and what you hope for
new, will snarl in other
new things that are still unknown,

moving sideways, will unravel as it
grapples with what should not be,
because it claims to be finished and whole.

ishmael (ii)

if you are overwhelmed by the tide
and sink to the depths, in
the shadows

take comfort in the fact history
is held by many hands

I carved your name into the skyline
at the cadence of the peaks, rising
and falling--and into the doorframes

where people pass, and hurry to the
next thing, and you carved mine

into the asphalt, along the tree-tops
in the glass,
and someone else will carve

the names of the others, elsewhere.

the immense clutter of eyes is our horror
and salvation, a glyph and a cipher

there is no one so small that they will be forgetten
none so great that they can resist dissolution

ishmael (i)

somewhere between where it's too dry for a joshua tree
and where the sage rises in clusters, and
where the winter stream-beds carve across the plain,

I left something by a rise in the road.

the crack in the window, lets in the wet night air,
it's hard to describe the view
out over the tree-line, cut by the walls

it's difficult to inscribe a window
onto a wall and open it,
in the distance

and the world exists in rooms we pass through,
or carry with us, walls,
the streets clogged with hallways and the

occasional creak of a door, a

whisper of a scent from elsewhere, but
windows are rare,

rooms rushing past each other, in flight
at haste

the lightning shatters across the basin,
flashes across the walls,

the glass thuds against the frame,
and shudders,

below the inky hills, the wind eddies
and the stars gleam
heedless and scattered, above the road

headlights blazing, somewhere, in the dark
higher across the slope

of those who came back--most did not remember
and some could not describe--
what they had seen before