The House

In the break, there was the beginning,
in the beginning there was the leak:

the sweat and blood that built a house
that would always break,

for it had been built by a being that bled--
a carpenter who carved his own mistake

in the wooden frame, to reassure a place
for his hand at the other’s stake.

Little hand made of wood, you are no more his own,
than in a dream--- the father and the tyke

scratched the itch with the same hand, not one
holding the other, but one asleep and the other woke.

Apostrophe

for M.H.

From a mutually ruined city, you call to me;
ashes to ashes, in an aria exceedingly alarming:
reader, we have fallen into one another as watchmen,
each unto his tower bonded
by a fascination with the other's fire.

You are not you, exactly, but what we look out on
together, over and over again
until what we see inspires the same breath
split between us, not quite at home
with ourselves in our disparate desperations.

Catharsis

Once, he did put his hand against your image,
no longer the liquid that once wade himself,
but a self-evidence, accumulating fingerprints,

where it was written
that each page unread would
steep its owner’s weight in water;

little half-drowned thing, without
enlightenment, you will not know
the pleasure of having been wade entirely.

Allegory

A long time you have been making the trip
from Boston to Amherst, turning over
sad thoughts in the snow--- embodying that trope

of winter, the perverted figure of the traveler
traveled too far deep in virgin snow--- nameless
example of a fervor that urges only to disappear.

You would put your blood-filled shoes behind glass,
if it meant such allegory--- would easily swallow
the sculpture cement to harden, as a callous.

Colors for Georg Trakl

To know the moment as blue
and not as red, is to see it for the first time
as it has always been, in inches,
bestowed through snow,

how it enters white and turns to blue
when you remember it: a kind of sleepy
process--- digging the sheep
that you’ve forgotten out of the snow.

Shepherd, alone, with the shovel in the storm,
what white bulk, becoming blue, do you turn over,
remembering your sister’s wrists--- what path
do you dig that has not already filled again?

Of the bread muffling his mouth,
he writes “not believing myself
the semblance of grain, the world
is for me bone drawn out of water.”

Lot’s wife sifted through my hands---
with the cut you kiss, in granulations, preserving
the point of entry, my first mourned for,
you will lose yourself, with me, in my blood.