Locked his body in gloom,
In clouds of dust from pellets
Made of mouse-bones and desire.
He weighed the balance of his yellow claws
Testing unspoken thoughts of diurnal flight,
While outside the summer is a blue eye
Rustling like a knife
Frosted like the steel of a nipple.
Smoke from logs that will never burn through
Cannot hide a great sun-swallowing dog.
We are penumbra of ourselves
A cluster of prepositions
The horizon turns green turns red
Breaks in blue
We are the mountains and the marshes
That we inhabit
Losing the distance of skylines within ourselves,
Tightrope walkers
On the bamboo bridge above the snow
In a flurry of our paper wings
There are aerostatic miracles in us
And these things that have been
Will be.
A low-voltage moon,
Unplugged at the window,
Shines through our gauze shark skins
We concatenate across the abysses inside us
The anaerobic thinness
Of the borders we carry
Between here and the somewhere else
We also are
In high-altitude breathlessness
We find, we are,
The peg my skin was hanging on,
The animal fur as you changed back
To human form,
Gullet and womb,
Forgotten touch and lost breath,
We are the thawings of our being
We are periphenomena
At the sides of our own existence.
Awaiting black water passage
In each new-opening lead.
