The poems the world left behind
i
once you awoke with a necklace of light serpenting
your throat in bronze coils as a dream slithered through
a freed window of consciousness as your wife pried you from sleep
write the world in the weight of the wind
at night you hum into a stanza’s furlong
amid the grief and the green recitations
drag the impossible vocabulary & replenished color in a tooth
“Describe a plainchant in a dream”
beneath the morning as tongues open to the sun
along a dream in a beam of fire in a backyard
cicada wings pattern on pages of Pessoa and Antunes
“Describe the Banhus of a dream”
in the garden a fisherman lifts his boot buckles onto the tile of his life
as love laments in electric currents as a fog horn sounds a dream
the pond’s hair static, the fingers in the kiln
write the world on the arm of a shadow
you fall into mud under the linden as you text the Dead
empty your yellow heart onto an ironing board on a late jade-afternoon
splatter the days run with mud across diesel-perfumed hills
awaken branch-by-branch in the arms of a Jacaranda’s shade
ii
you awake
and put away the pen and take to the air
a caboose tied at your waist filled with a locket of words
vellichor, petrichor, apricity, and the noctivagant
a kerfuffle of mad vocabulary dream with online dictionary ease
scratch at your forehead as love dies hard in the mouths
of the awkward aquiver in the streets alas, you said
take the sand in your heart and the dark in your lungs
where words wing tigers circling the street lamp, gut it all
in the morning, as your cat gifts you the dead of the body
of a mouse left at the foot of a bed, your socks and broken phone
purr as the dawn dissipates an approaching stack
of poems left in a leaf pile to leave the world behind
and burn
