the heron’s heart Van Ruisdael’s brushstroke 

 its song the birch that kills you

 in your dirtbike heart a cow falling

 where the hippos sleep january snow

 independent thought the jellyfish's wishbone

 the king must die three weeks of dragonflies

 perched bird the silence of dna

 w/ the word thursday we fix rain

 the ceiling ab negative 

  

finding audubon’s mystery birds a burdock bulb

 hambone infinity god makes a squid

 in the deep the heart of ice rain is sapphire

 

 the creek's pretence at resoluteness winter drizzle 

 congealed in a puddle discarded skies

 after-rain steam sweating off the weight of blindness

 

 mewling tinnitus a poem once

 

 your nose a shark looking towards saturn 

 sometimes strong giraffe eyes

 stare a condition of the eye that belies the soul’s long rains

 

  

skimming bridge waters a collared cloud

 fault in a tourniquet an inundation

 

 sunk in darkness words long dead in the telling

 

 following instructions we make ears for wasps

 listen the unraveled whimpers from an ingrown silence coiled in a diary 

 wakened to drips on her brush blue water coating sheep bells

 the cosmos flowers like it or not  even in cracked persimmon suns

 

  

just caught a soft glimmer from a  foot-stabbed sun dial in the dark 

 his arrhythmic heart
on a treadle…
does the weaver know?

 until the air comes clear again flat in the layered stillness

 

 long day in the rose bush another finger bleeds