Published: January 31, 2008

I have snagged you like a fish,

midstream, wet and wriggling:

your many loves

diffuse over time.

The safe country waits,

songs of locked doors and heat

and O, the white picket fence of

gestation—

we are fractions of a whole

in the turtledove revival of

comatose institutions.

At dawn the dew collects,

worms breach the earth with

tiny holes for the light to seep in.

The half moon slice,

thin and fragile, hangs beside

stars burning hollow and

slowly filling with iron,

waiting to erupt.

The bedsheets turn like

angelfish gills

in the clear blue

of warm seas we have not swam.

The salt fills my throat,

heavy with old sadness,

the glint of love

on my new skin

and smoothness of morning,

the soft anesthesia.

The strain of knead and buckle

is comfort; you play me

like a harp and you I have plucked

from fields of wildflowers

where the wind moves in patterns

and arcs and diagrams,

stretching out to the mountain’s base

where we harvest sweet fruits

and drop seeds like children,

nestled in the curves of shoulders

and grabbing to be held.