Braided sand unskeins
To a skin of blue water, blotch or
Pond, and I stride its
Surface—tension temporarily

Waylaid, wandered out
Like lines in marble; mazy flaw
Thirteen hundred years
Will turn to statue, stone

Inventing art, brighter than
Any lemon but these
Framing this sky;
Mouth open and full

Of silence, and it hits
You, breaks luxury known
As surface; breaks,
Reveals tender interior

Where what tone depends
On how long the blood’s been
Let, or latticed; crystal rivet
With velocity in its sights

Kick your eyes out of operation:
Oh you, you blue and
Almost true, almost too
Dissolved to substantiate any grit.

Where marble peels, desire
Stutters down
His thigh: off he strides
Down promenade,
Declension of lack,
Less than that,
Afternoon drama at
Meridian lake marges.
Where his thigh
Rivets, stride breaks into
A dance of utmost stutters;
98.3 degrees
Becomes low fever,
Fibrillated blue or blurs
These veins like veins in marble
Prove matter must be fractal,
Dimensions some platitude of
Gods, hounds gone the way
Of word or ward, wounding at
Circumference—purl exceeds far out.

I misplace myself and find
What could suffice for soul, its
Whole translation—one
Anyone can understand;
Thus anyone can hang by their thews
To the undersides of sad stories:
Idolatries of place parsed out as
Wing, thigh, breast, some
Crazed carriage sets myth lit.

When you put three
Trees on an acre, that’s
An environment: who
Wouldn’t want one of those than
Mere scenery—thus they
Lead to archaic freshet, dibs on coordinates
Conjure porous visions I and I and I
Grind unto myself: lens logic stripes and ices.

Seraphim could clear, and clear
Clarity of its abrading airs—
Catastrophes with god
Fragments mixed in, so we
Die at this many frames.
Petrarch reads his pattern as snow
Falls in Tyrolean meadow,
At bus-stop or parking
Lot. Birds eat, and gods
Eat memories of fairer birds. All that
Millet drapes dream, slow
Angle of incident—and never wakes.

Marble sweats so I know
Some god has entered this gallery.
Somewhere yesterday of Eden
Tourmaline seams became veins,
Lines of intention in
Granite wetness and wind
Turn into an elegy for statue.
I look at my hair,
See grass: shattered glass in my
Reflection, funeral with
Declension of doom for horizon—
Little Elysian where tender curls and tenderer.

“Five senses lead to fact,” till finally
One emerges at fault, some sixth
Chamber good for nuzzling marble.

Light shades its veins; I sing
To my ribs, song of stretch and
Linger, light long after its horizon:

No kind of answer, rough
On tongue, pressed
To your ear, trying to

Steal your hearing, make you
Miss me on repeat, some brink
From which lightness scatters—

Simmer of etch and fall, very
Graceful, like how those
Artisans drew gazelle eyes.

I ward off thing and
Luxuriate in possibility,
Which dwindles by
The second: less than
That—whole
Days go by with me in sweats.
One day, ambling a
Gallery, a girl told her father
“Look, a human statue.”
This pleased me.
I long to touch myself and
In the process warm marble:
Rock or is it mineral, or some medley—
Now an arc I walk
Inventing a script for living.