# 9 (in the yellow night)

it is impossible to forget
the sound of the water as it moves under the rocks
and over the rocks
past low hanging trees
bowing down to dip their branches in
and be cooled

all of this remains,
but it is like
himitsu-bako,
or a burr puzzle
and it is harder to find space
for such large pieces

#8 (of the Avatamsaka Sutra)

Working at night, alone
we are all together

# 7 (tessellation)

sleep inertia, coupled with
mechanical phosphenes
between the thin mattress
and the down comforter

on my back, two-thirty.
watching the changes,
the prisoner’s cinema

heinrich klüver reckoned
four types of things, we
all of us, see: lattices,
cobwebs, tunnels, and spirals.

I am awake, but only just
and the honestly cold night
comes in through the window
from the city, glowing, outside

there are no gaps in this
admixture – it has slowly
become, as a nest or riverbed,
our great concatenation

we are all connected by:
these several layers of stone

& when we are alone,
in darkness not afforded here
even then, we are.

#6 (gasping and shipwrecked)

there is a David Ruffin song for
each & every variety of heartache
and I fold like when hinged, inward
gasping and shipwrecked
sick in my stomach
shivering on the floor,
on my brothers futon, two-thirds soft

#5 (on urban heat island)

at night, walking through a city entirely indoors,
a long hallway, & everything is distributed
for maximum effect in one continuous
effort of effortless, concrete parataxis
so that this street is homogenous.

at each node it intersects two other streets,
and this is a recursive process, continuing
until there is nothing but streets, and all
is perfectly perpendicular, & the landscape is
only the manifestation of a single 90º angle
which we have gladly allowed to multiply,
by feeding it daily labor and stone.

all around this city
even the parks are square.

# 4 (for Joseph Wright of Derby, for this place)

I will edge out the pastoral,
excise the solemnity
& discard, repeat, discard
what is bark and brass

this new, vertical place
with it’s sedimentary
skyline, a crenellation
like stone teeth, irregular

I am the bird inside
the globe, time is
the pump, & soon
the air will be gone.

# 3 (what is the moon? nobody knows.)

what is the moon?
no one really knows.

maybe it’s soft white felt
on dry, itchy wool

or a breath of light
the night sky takes

swelling with whiteness,
and then exhaled.

is it the night’s drain
the starlight circles.

the accretion of the glow
given off like pollen
from each humming streetlight.

maybe it’s an eye-hole
cut in the fabric of the night.

it could be a pearl, I suppose
flawed and dusty.

what is the moon?
no one really knows.

#1 (because you are celestial, but keep your glow restrained)

the biological imperatives:
survival, territorialism, competition,
reproduction, & quality of life-seeking.

these: some real science facts,
no joke serious information –

not like my information,
informal, bananas.

I could kiss you on the face,
every time the calliope passes
and and and
it would be the same.

more realistically,
on account of your wet mouth -
a callioflute-hydraulophone.

Like a carousel,
every time you pass,
roundandup, roundanddown.

        I feel I’m constantly waiting in yr vestibule
        braiding wires to restore the flow of current
        the perpetual entrancebound circuit unbreaker.

words do what I say
and I know the names
of all the winds
(brothers Boreos and Notus,
brothers Eurus and Zypherus)
& still

the persistence of was
remains

and you are not here.