It’s a mind travel apparatus, he says, and puts the cloth cap on my copperhead.

Under my chin he fastens a strap that reads, You’ll know when you get there,   while the sun reads through his red beard as small genetic music on the wall.

 

*

And then I sleep like that.

 

In his small bed while wet wind came that cradled, like the fingering weave of the plants we saw for miles on that inlet highway. The road like an open word, or the stink of livestock, or the feather we breathed through the truck’s interior like a keystone, like a swear on a life.

 

I went to where the red dust finds the hearts it keeps for lifetimes. I went to place where the wheat bears the witness.

 

*

 

In a borrowed bed, in a borrowed state, two women lay with their heads propped on pillows. And they are you and I, or the let go breath of the bird’s new lung slipping between valves. Or there, in the spread of cornfield, or in water, or whisky, or rain.

And we could not swear one way or the other, and wouldn’t risk it.

 

*

 

The snaking river out the window is your hand at my neck. Every fish that dies falls like a blow to the center. And in this we leave, that which we have, to the swallowing outlines of distance.

 

*

 

Lily. Caravan. America. These are the lists we draw up.

 

Even where we looked at buildings of a future, our pens traced the blind contour of what we most remember of right now:                   All through the floors of this house-                                                                                                            the shape of feet made of leather and cloth,

 

that keep us from touching, from the gravel in the feet or the coal, dragging the black line drawing from toe to heel. Yay, how it shrinks and sloughs off its meaning in the shimmering background of the getaway mirror, in the way the Midwest breathed through the doors of the places we keep like a secret in our bodies and in the bodies of men.

 

*

 

A child in a landscape I did not recognize, recognized me: a plaza packed tight with people, and in his face was the runaway water.

 

*

 

An ocean waits with a mouth. We play with words in the mouth. And in the shape of that which is spelled, always correctly and with a certain spirit, we make I love you with the tongue of believers and set our white chests to the sun.

 

Follow me.

 

Keep west to the center. Love the body to the center. To the man whom we almost always headed, say, Yes, I returned and knew the place for the first time.

 

*

 

We drove the whole of Arkansas on side streets. A single day. The longest green line swings a flat brush-stroke open in all four directions- no wind. We drive-talk for states and spit out the windows in a way takes the whole century in the fist. Takes the radio in the fist. And when the train passes the meat smoker we become them both, and the light is something else here, and we are that too. Or the farm-boy I loved made of paper:

a small romantic bead of sweat on the edge of a state line.

 

*

 

I stop for oil. Against a white wall four black men smoke thin brown cigarettes against the heat. Oil shines in their hair and the one with yellow eyes, leans in the window to tell three hundred miles worth of directions down the foot. And he so slow with the talking that I’m in his teeth by the end, and the wet lips he wraps to the yellowed leaf’s stick is now a permanent part of what makes me a woman.

 

I can’t love a man doesn’t smoke like that. Or stand like that. In the heat like that with the shirt still starched and tucked in smooth.

 

Source.

 

Mined here, grown here. Buried up the path in the yard of a tavern. Map in the footprint. Every road by heart.

 

Bury the barrel of the gun.

Forget what you think you know about the middle.

Drive the rest your life to get gas here again.

 

The lines hand-dug along the highway skitter a pattern but it’s not for me.

 

*

 

In regular waking, you walk through a doorway, you are aware of the door, and you avoid it. While sleepwalking, you are aware of the door somehow too. The difference is still floating, is what he asks, between the two: The grey of awake, the point where the woman no longer is, and into the dark of the new kind of seeing.

 

The difference is,             in black lettering,             Write your fucking dissertation.

 

The difference is, a man here now, looking for accuracy while I bring him four cups of a coffee and a halved croissant.             One pad of butter.

 

*

 

And then years have passed.

 

Around my eyes, thin creases play from the sun I have opened myself to. At the edges, begins the shadow of the place where the south lay down its head. Everything about my beauty is tattered and brown. That which is waterless and waits for rain.

Or the voice of the bodiless bird I keep caged. Or the hands of a man who loves land and loves hunger.

 

Follow.

 

The red river is a source you know well. The sun is the crease and your love of the creasing.

 

* * *

 

They beat the drum. And I come to the place.

And too mariachi.

So too with the lilt and spray of strings and the sounds that give thingness its body, which so resembles a woman, bent towards the earth.

 

The more I ache for soil, the more I slip away.

I dream a child, briefly, and then just as fast: a small ring of rain and then, nothing. Dark space in a bedroom wherein I make the outline roundness of longing with my empty arm.

 

The space that holds love is sorrowful.

Even its victories have gentle sadness in them, a taste of salt.

 

Unseen remedy, I still have faith. To the body unmarked where the land rises southern: I cannot be afraid of you. And the gash of beard at the face. And to the hands folded with morning: The sky is a wash of the orange we invented, there at the concrete steps, and do you remember what we said to stay so young:                        we said, here,

 

but we meant it,             and before fell back and away.

 

Dearly. I hold your hand in my sleep.

Dearly. I call you sister to any black car that passes.

 

And where your chin meets the tilt of Tennessee night falling, I see my own death, or feel it, in the second when wind goes warm.             And everything merges.

 

We were men or are.                         And we love it.

 

For the way sanctimonious thrum points us out to black water and says, like he told us, turn your body to the unnamed loop. Keep on like that, till red dust finds you.

 

 

* * *

 

There are machines we trust to bring us together.

In the mouth of one he says,

 

I am always haunted by you. And you are barefoot. And the robin’s eggs.           

 

All night he makes the sounds of this, through dark windings that scour the cliffside in their own sacred search for the places where lines come together.

 

I am homesick for nowhere.                         But his voice means me.

 

In bed it finds me, small woman at the center of nothing but this one room, and one man’s idea of home: those we love hold the dearest places on the maps that track us.

Where my arm ends, land drops off to grey distance. To the fog he waits for. And miles become, always, just a word spoken over and over again.

 

Even our voices show this: meeting on some thin riddled wire, the length of a country from each other, suspended, the ground below us is an interchangeable verity whose names we come to know mean nothing but

here lies a river and here, a line of trees.

 

All without meaning lest a body we know well choose there,

for lying, or for shelter from rain.

Everything is pliable. And grows and dies according to who loves it.

Tonight, I am sorry California. He’s wiped you clean from between us with a sound. 

 

Only the body is the country we never leave, and how together those bodies make a landscape we grow to need like water. And to miss and to reach for, when we ride bikes into black night. We hold geography in our mouths for each other. We look for soil we have already found.

 

All the cities I long for are the people I see in dreams. All the hearts I wait for are cities in the shape of men. Or a train in a yellow horizon saying everything we needed to know about resting a head on a chest or shoulder.

 

Now, northwest, keep the boy in safety.             Now I am South, earlier East,

 

And through smoke and low light I reach out            

with notes in the throat like a drawing in breath

and it is the same as taking his hand,

and the fingers of every sign he passes,                         and the hand of a language.

 

You are right Ben. I am barefoot. And the thing you see is a place to be sure. And we are already there and destined to never make it and to love it always, and to be eluded by the human risk that is loving and living, on the verge of an understanding too big to ever hold. This one truth: there is nowhere that holds us like we hold each other.

 

* * *

 

 

The white room is a dream we are having at the same time. The white room is the same as the calcium that has conceived my keeping together. And yours- to the teeth that you bare, to the teeth that keep moving, to the one round burning out center of the magic we call sun, and also, poem.

 

All the words mean everything at once. I say woman, which is the same as putting my foot down.

 

You hear invitation and a sharp kind of singing in a tongue you never learned and the Latin name for the bone of a wing which is hollowest, which is best at flight.

And we are all right and speaking in unison.

 

This is my white room and the words for it:

California. Body of water. Fringe. Other.

 

And to my right hand it is the exact replica of the woods I knew from before knowing. To my left: a thread running from my chest to a thousand others. To yours.

 

You.

 

You are here always, you most of all.

 

I like you in my mouth as             God.

I like to spit you out as             promise.

I like you best as you are:           wordless.             nameless.            

For this is death: to be named and held. To be capitalized.

 

And we know it, you and I. Dear you: do you remember when we met? Neither do I.

Look we tell children we will not have: hope is a number. A mere gesture of fingering.

 

But our eyes are on the horizon just over their shoulders. For forty hours the sky has been moving in circles of heat and the wet warm of summer. It swallows itself and regrows from the place, in cauliflowered, rolling shrugs hanging heavy, bruised and ripe. But the lightning doesn’t come. In any other state, we’d be under water. Here, we wait in lines with open mouths. In its shadow we make out the figure of a truth that has run out on us and the waving, hollow sheath of a seed, held for a single moment, still, where two dry winds have collided mid-air.

 

Carefully.

Do not explain too much.

 

Take a small hand and thrust it into soil. Let time speak for itself.

 

You and I are waiting for something that isn’t going to happen, someone says. But it doesn’t matter. I have seen where white filament snaps ground. I will wait forever. I will let my tongue dry out with waiting.

I have seen the rooms where men become women. I have seen the seed drop and be silent and the table where the wool is felted. I have walked myself on a line through space. I have mended. So too have I broken, have I shattered and made tired with reason.

 

Carefully.

Do not explain too much.

Do not say, I have not seen death, or death will find you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I cannot say what was or was not of things I saw then, what fish were real, or where it mattered. I cannot make sense of pronouns, of he, or if it’s the same he mentioned somewhere else, or, again, in a moment.

 

These things are all secondary to this: flight is a built-in logic. 

Everything we say grows a body and chooses a side.

 

To him I would say, were he an animal,            lay your head here.  capitalize nothing.

 

* 

Carrion. Or the ways land use isn’t.

 

And what I hear next comes from a mouth without teeth, the body of a woman with the head of the fish he drew, again and again, on the concrete walls of the emptied pool, when he gestured, sit by my side. Come to the small place where we need nothing.

 

*

A wide white room.                        

 

A man says : When the whale threw its body out of the planet’s deepest belly, I watched the harpoon slide between its ribs and part red tide.

 

And it must have been like a flag, that wash against white sky.  Or the shape of a continent splitting under its own impossible weight,  the agony of borderlands, or a single scarlet wing,  ruined.

  

*

Benefit.

 

In front of him, a different current- the collective lean of faces anxious to be a part of the moment where art reaches a hand to dead whale’s forehead. We bid to make gesture, at prices lower than a piece of a body fetches on a market gone black.

 

We are all wearing sweatshirts, bought in different stores, manufactured in the same cities, who burn the factory oil that the whales leave heavy in the brine.

 

Water was here, where electricity fills things up, in yellow glow we all listen, and what we hear speaks volumes:                         nothing.             He is forgotten as soon as he is done.

 

*

 

But in some intangible way, we all feel it:             loss, breathing from behind the frames and hot white lighting. None of it can stop the sling of the weapon from trigger to gut, massive body of salt and tendon,             dead,          brushstroke after brushstroke.

 

Should we be men, let us throw our bodies between blade and belly. Let us burn the art to the ground.     

If only for the fuel to get there.

 

 

 

He was very tall and the slick bald of a monk.

 

An upstairs bedroom.

An unused summer.

In the bed of a friend who went to work. And he gets me ready with:

 

The cacao nut is actually a purple bulb.

Borges.

A home-made ink of rusted nails and brine.

 

Everything he did was right. And when he charted my body into one-inch squares and put his mouth inside each one, I should have felt, if nothing else, a small, lovely risk in the drag of the pen’s rough quill across my skin. But as he moved over me and whispered, The ink is permanent, hear the word break in the way it is wanting:

 

I fall out of love with poetry forever. I damn language. I sweat the ink off into pools of grey water and smears of black line.             All that science and the word working through his mouth to make residence slides a wet bead down the back and is nothing.                        

 Steam.                        

 A sheet off a mattress.

 A sung reproach in the guttural call of a body.

 

Everything he did was right. Just not now. Or some things are only beautiful, because they do not happen. Or strangers only glow who stay strangers. Sometimes, the longing is what fills up best.

 

Before this, any word swelled in me.

Before this: Borges how you had me.

And I slipped out of panties for the great black print of men

and the men who read them.       Or memorize.    Or steal to make parcel.

 

Now the body just wants to be part of a thing that happens at once for two moments and has grace. And is wordless and without good light.            

And a kiss then is, any object you covet for status or song.

 

Pocketed. Dried up in heat and ruined by water.

 

His cleverness is a thimble that stands for nothing.