for Anna

 

i

I don’t know why
I love you like I do
reordering an alphabet of changes
in the spacecraft’s green shadow

 

ii

I can feel you
in my teeth
like the etymology of the name
of the city we both live in

 

iii

gates

“almost kill myself with the saddest joy”

 

iv

there are so many ways to read backwards
& what the water & what the water &

 

v

letters crystal brains breathe chrysalis
letters breathe breath mere chrysalis air

creatures come carrying cargo.space
craft conglomerate.these
comatose cocksuckers carried

past on stretchers
“anybody like everybody”

we uninvented boats,
drank pleiades & iceberg to put this strange
grammar in our lungs

 

vi

it is frightening.
it is frightening.

it is a frightening thing that a ghost
holding a club is chasing after &
capturing a living man.

it is frightening to hear your name
in a letter mailed between dreams

it extends to mean ‘in awe’

 

vii

“you couldn’t see the rain any longer”

partitions of the perceptible shift so that
light that is like light
takes on in the sky
the same role that names
have in a language

 

viii

if the air around the tower
makes a person lose her memory

if a city finds
a city by shadow

I can feel you under the lid of my eye,
sand in the stone sand in the stone
names partitioning the light

& what the water

 

ix

                           enter
electricity, octaves, concentric senses of
color in the story voices

were soft under our feet we
listened & listened till we heard
the contingencies out of weather

systems shift man animal
clock of blood ash informed
in the street’s shifting intimacies

 

viii

            past abstract such together
            starcharts extra ongoing
            past abstract such together
            cataracts red pulse equations

“and if then everything happening now”

 

vii

its original meaning was early,
a setting moon in the sky &
a man laboring with hands

which comes first, the past
or questions?

it extends to mean will & wish,
lasting hatred.

 

vi

the street a thousand eyes per branch

            the street’s extravagant comedies
            cascade I waking excavate
            extra streets vagrant comedies
            ex tempore on cavalcades

pyramids pose problems.extra
polations pull at people.ratios
pool, pixels pollinate

 

v

I shine a red light into the piano you are hearing

 

iv

beating its rich sullen moon
“& high above the lights”

 

iii

            roots of words

glow in the subways where
people have taken the form
of books & arranged themselves
in libraries.

 

ii

& everything takes on weird
new refractory purpose
twisting our narrative like the
ice cubes in a great metropolis