Poetry Archives

I.

And together we’re pulled closer into the absence,
permeated by recurrent distortions in our knowledge—

our luminous arguments spun out, our rare velocities radiating
from an emptiness at the core—

And now our ruling differences are all flaws in equivalent flow
(our old iconicity of greening sheaf, of sheet)

All our sweet purchases already starting toward inversion—
All matter draining energy from the gravitational field—

II.

Unraveling wave, stringent fluidity
holding the inversions, the aqueous
version so certain in its dragging:
kelp, crab, conch, whelk, the pebbles
and glass, wooden planks
and a barnacled clatter of gulls…
Graveled alluvion.
All distance hauls.

III.

An imprint in the shape of its own erasure—
how it’s pressing itself into pattern, and disparity, in the ashen light—

And the bodies, the limbs and faces, rough with it,
unfinished in their marble enclosures

(sufficient in their own kind of life—)

IV.

Rain opening, apparently indefinite.
Working inside an isotropic, flanking wind,

precipitate downpours tear at the netting
of our contending inventions—

and at all our erratic inveighing—
A leveling, brackish wind shifts

inside our empty lexicon, accumulating
differences, sharpening them—

its cantillation scraping
at the inexorable lovers
(infalling matter)

using us away—
to the underside of wave,
to the salt vicinities.