The Hungering Eucalyptus

The eucalyptus glittering

at midnight like a bright lung—shivering, hanging

its wildly silent sigh. The inner

Eye says that moon could be a man’s

glowing heart—frozen

in the body of the goatherder

they found in the ice

clutching a woolen sack with green bread in it.

His eyelashes stiffened like a star’s

frail condensation and when they opened

his chest, it stunned them with its silence.

A giant white heart

enchanting the opened

forest of his rib cage. They wondered at

the lacquered muscle of his body,

how it glittered, streamed, nightingaled—

red-golds and satiny purples

spilling like a drunken hand its heartbreak

of scotch thrown at the window. The argument

against a failed love, refracted by rain. My brother, once,

unable to speak, the sad drunk in him

breaking out at midnight, because she left him . . . Life—how

it always comes down to whether

we are lost or found or kissed or alone

in the blank storm of our lives.

Moon, or hospital light.

Grave, or body.

Breath, or the rapid shivering

of the green shatter of the dead lighting

the night window, white and silver. And the tempting

in our hands, the lave, the lost

drink. How the leaves clip rain and shadow.

They wondered how Death

in the hungering eucalyptus, the moon drips

dirty romantics for the living

who can’t sleep. Deaths of my loved ones

I do not know why. There is always someone being taken

away but to where? Brother

where did she disappear, your first love, into what

bodiless rustling? Night has woken up

inside me, this pale rendering

bloodless, as the shrieking of blue jays through

my sleep. This late, I managed rapt moonlight in the leaves,

keeping my eye on the daggers . . .