Esteban Moore, Heather Thomas, Craig Czury.
Sonar
Your sonar of loneliness
reaches farther than mine
Someone only needs to be in the next room
or on another floor
An actual angel in the play
may fade with time
You in the nothingness of night
with two oranges, a wall map
of the Atlantic sea floor
sunlight, twilight, midnight, trench
In the multi-night encountered
without you, I am someone else
Moon from a crevice, open terrace,
in the same room with blue globes
you’re thinking about nothing
and it’s very clear
the sound is a dream
we were pure but forgot
walking down years
my hands uplifted into yours.
Actionable Intelligence
There is actionable intelligence
in red-brick row houses,
spirit windows, no religion but love
burns on the fire escape.
There were wedding guests,
a singer in the tent,
infiltrators slipping borders,
blood diamonds all night.
Tirzah, you vanished
with the honey bee
in ruins open to air.
al-Ali, who knew your name?
Everything exists because
something else does.
I am a transient mannequin
wearing bright costumes
of vanity and oblivion
if happy nations have no history.
The Room of Not-Knowing
There’s a bed, a lamp, a bureau,
the drawer filled with your socks.
You keep the corners clear
for piles of laundry, magazines.
You sit at the desk hunting
what you don’t know in words
unspooling filigreed patterns
laced like nests across an inner sky.
When the nests fall
from the weight of their knots
you make new ones
or give up and construct a series
of shifting screens dark or light
depending on whether you
remembered to change the bulb.
Some have the translucence of pearls
or the wings of mating dragonflies.
Sleeping above you the skeleton
dangles your writing hand from its ear.
You come through rain
before everything strung and fallen,
brief as photos, your chance
to live at the heart of the real
and to tell. You are perturbed
by the pronunciation of your name.
Wallace Stevens House Prayer
323 North Fifth Street, Reading, Pennsylvnia, USA
In the walled space between
red brick rowhouses
heal us, Sandman
sliver of sky and a girl
of half-risen day
conjuring in the sandbox
under a dusty sun
these bricks where
cake, castle, catacomb
winding and unwinding
with the difficult rightness
of sand three stories down
the black iron fire escape:
Heal us, Sandman,
with the difficult rightness
of half-risen day,
of half-risen day,
these bricks where
the redness sticks fast.
