1.

You blew me
softly and precisely,
unceremonious
because I’ve grayed and dried.

But I had been so close to you
and held on till I couldn’t,
till I shook down from your scalp
and arrested on the glossy untelling screen
and you couldn’t touch me there, in the open
because the text underneath – words of a
candidate of some promise –
respond with fear.

I spin on the gust from your chest
to join an adjacent everything
where I’ll enjoy new preoccupations,
and who knows but I’ll return to you
by soil or drink or animal or other wind
scattered and lively and fresh?

2.

I have a room aside
where I let down your endorsements.
Hundreds of uncatalogued poets and sages,
mountains and beach towns.
I spread them on the floor
so the sun will pass them over
from the window across
and bleach their letters
leaving the impression of your hand,
so that in my later years
I can know its specter

For now, I have my back right pocket,
where I hold close
for my moonlit joy
a precious record of your distastes
for grime and commotion and untimeliness.

Don’t mistake me for a cynic –
I am agreeable and attentive.
Things go where they go.
This page rustles and tickles my leg in my pace
because there is more of you to savor
in your buried wanting myths.

3.

When I catch a still moment, I disassemble my obliviating dread.
I work in observance of its wholeness and finish.
I am like a bicycle mechanic, with stand and tools.
I am methodical; I crank, and listen, and feel.
Afterwards, when the piled up parts are again diminished,
and the sounds of my labor quiet,
the whole I’d remade stands apart.
In my hand, one shard
which seems duplicate, with nowhere to go.
So I walk the hot day to the second-hand store,
and pick a latch-top basket to shut it tight and safe.
It is labeled with the mark of my unfelt want
for an inward and soothing promise.

Instead of prying it, find me steeping in the hot grass,
my dew-shampooed hair drying with the leaves that buoy and spread it,
and settle into me
and theorize to me, and close my eyes.

4.

The lake’s slip-shadow contours bubble and dance at me
while a scavenging ant gives my ankle a welcoming tickle.
Its solitude is deceptive; while its eyes don’t reach the mansions across,
it senses its thick community all amongst the sun-heated gravel.
My upshore companions bellyflop in. I choose torpedo, and swiftly decorporealize –

until I breach I am a collection of not-mes: lungs, shoulders, aching thighs.
The thoughts I used to make are absent, turned vapor in the sound

– my ragged breathing truncates my swim; I ain’t a fish, after all.
Scattered carp-scale sailboats give unflattering shape to the wind,
as if it could only blow mightily, and not caress.
A couple are bored by a man’s egging on
and they wade in, feet clenched to the stones, keeping their heads in the air.

5.

Find a divet fit for you and lie down on the sloped bank,
letting the unharming beetles search and frolic among your leg hairs.
Fire your cannonball thoughts upwards –

What song can speak of love without accounting for leaf chatter?

– and watch them crash into the sleek water before us;
see them vaporize, and feel their splash on your tousled hair.
The yielding gravel lets you on down; you settle where it settles.
Dunk your teabag thoughts in the waves’ soft churn –

Is there a poet who only lays their calves in the surf, and reads nothing?

– and listen to a boy shouting in greeting from his boat
as he turns and gybes in the heaving, unstopping breath of it all.