MY PLACE IN THE HORIZON
Pines bow like squirrel tails,
arrow tips suspended above soil
cast the momentary in dust.
East and west winds converge between
hills where no one belongs,
paths unmade, a wall of fog, stones
no one intends to carve.
The grass receives me, opens like a mouth
beneath a stream of water. The sun does not exist,
only the contoured omen
of moon, black and white, dove eye, owl eye.
There’s no need to know each other,
the deer and beetle exist without names,
as I do, the marmot and the bear have no language,
and I am at ease knowing we slip like silhouettes
of fish into the stream’s current.
No one can foretell the future and that’s fine.
Since nothing belongs to me, since I’ve never
built a bridge or paved a road,
since I’m projected onto the space I will never arrive
I will find my place in the horizon
as I wither like a tree, dry out and grow
hard, and learn about everything limitless
and my thoughts are just a spark,
a lamp bursting over a table papered with letters,
phrases stained yellow, chaos
of dawn on a row of houses, shoulder to shoulder,
so the outline brims and spills over.
Loneliness is an unbroken line of migrants.
If only they could find a place to rest.
◆
COLD TRUTH
It’s spring beneath the trees.
An invisible, steady breath moves through the shadow roots,
turns darkness into a language,
coaxes the petal to draw itself out of nothing,
blesses the outline of the seed, summons
a vibration, splits it open—and from there, pulp,
the instant of pulp, a redwood premonition.
And I realize I know nothing,
that these strange seasons are not mine,
that the sea does not smell as it once did,
that I fear nothing at night,
that no one is following me,
that no figure lingers behind me always,
that I no longer recognize the foliage, the tremble
of insect colonies whose only presence is a sound.
Here, my family is everything that does not arrive with evening.
Winter gathers in the breath of every room.
◆
BESIDE EVERY SINGLE THING
If I could finally return and speak the name
carved of moonstone
and horse tracks in mud.
The curse that made me whole.
If only I could return. If I could
rise above the things that bind me.
If I could leave a trace of ash on the stone
like a cave-drawn prayer. If my mouth
pressed the cup’s rim and my tongue felt
the familiar taste, the familiar desire,
and if my lips, my memory of eternity,
traced back to this unending day, a shaded spring
where animals come to drink and disappear—
everything would be so simple. So simple.
But here I am, at each and every moment, seated
in the theater’s first row, watching a puppet
repeat a single, undiscernible word.
I want to clap, but I don’t dare.
I can’t shatter that boundless monologue
with my brittle applause.
