toadlily press

roiled water
glints of scales  teeth

they say fish climb trees here
I believe them

why did we come?  yesterday’s
question

today’s blotted out
by whirring sounds

faint stirrings
on the undersides of our arms

over our heads  great green vines
tangle and loop

one thing is clear:
there can be too much green

our raft seems to be
dissolving

you hold me  whisper
perhaps we are not really here

while I whisper
I see fish in the trees

narrate the language of skin

in the pocket of the belly

plot the blue of the eyes or edge of a cheek

at the juncture of chin and neck

hold the alphabet of thumb

before it flies out the door

put an ear in the curvature of one arm

and how this invokes the body’s epic

the tale of how the body moves

along the slope of a line

surely someone will want to hear

the body talks in brush strokes

in utterances in breaths

about how it folded itself

around lumbar and sacrum

to make a grammar of muscle and joint

how it praised lung and heart

the body making and unmaking itself

The night she left he finally learned to dance.
Her perfume sucked into its bottle, prey
into a passing snake, a passing train.
And in its wake, sharp bubbles she would say
bassoons plinked skyward making way against the rain.

Tonight, without the stony slosh of toes
to work around, without the actual back
that travels on its own agenda, washed
in wishing for her hair beneath his cheek,
he spun her out among the light-years and the lost.

He found a way to glide her (though the door
was sticky with her fingerprints, the rug
impressed with heels, the sink still tearful with her toothpaste),
pull her closer than the body of his breath,
dip her perfect weight exactly at the ghostly waist.

How I cannot see the faces of the dead anymore,

the grandmothers still meaning,
so long gone.

Did it happen,
a dream

so long gone, so fugitive
the mystery of those lives, most-lived before mine
gone,
a dream

here,
color or sound
on the inside, floating in the dark, in mind,
pictures in mind, those faces, faded to the mind-color or sound,
fugitive, always running,
so felt
made the darkness of the mind, time, the moment after moment now,
surviving the vivid.