Elegy Addressed (Atom Cloud, Hand)

At the end of the needle: the eye.

At the end of the eye: smoky pirouettes of swans

in a turned lake, robed in their black angers.

If you were in the ruins and the ruins inside you were a lake.

If you swam in the lake of your ruined mind, bullet

and umbilical, biting down time,

biting it clean as the widening field of inquiry

in a bright telescope,

the view at the end of a diminishing city.

~

This is the one to end all dreams.

A hunger so large it stops the mouth.

We wrap up the dreamer in giant leaves

before tossing him into the river.

The villagers say,

“The fish are ravenous.”

A great wave comes to lick

clean the gnats

in the bed of the dreamer.

~

You are

a sparrow shell that something

made a tiny hole in to suck the yolk out.

You are

the overturned train

inside the shell: red-velvet seats, bits

peeled off and stuck to the sides

of the track,

which is twisted and wrapped

out and around like someone’s hair—

as if a mouth put to one silver line

could pitch a sound across and over,

until everything was covered

in that single small noise.

~

And if the town inside you

were burning

and the women and children were

balls rolling in a rubber ring

and you could pull out a single person

which person would you choose?

Duck, duck, goose.

You know how this goes.

Maybe you’re like the stethoscope

without the doctor.

Or the rubber flower that comes to

stand in for the flower.

That’s like the song I’m making for you.

I confuse you with everyone else

I meant to save, or love.

~

This is what I’d like to tell you.

I don’t know how/ to take care

of anyone.

Imagine/ a woman crossing into herself

so deeply/ that even animals

used to burrowing in winter

can no longer

sense her presence.

And sometimes when I love a/ boy

I want to take him inside/ my arms the way

a seam swallows a dark spreading mark.

I want to blow his irises black.

And I want/ to coax the flower

the carmine/ flower

until it closes on the insect that’s made its

home/ inside it,

the brilliant glass beetle that knows no

other/ world than this one.

Then we topple, two pins in the middle

of a jellyfish diaspora.

~

Even now, I do not know how

to go through with this procedure.

I’d rather let the entire stem

of the body atrophy than cut off

a single hand. Here, in the room,

I lick the threads so that the two bits fuse,

then blow them clean. Sun makes a halo

behind the hand-held mirror. The mirror

is cold on the side I face, plate of flame

on the other. My face is clear.

How do I let go, if I’m not willing

to leave anything behind?

~

Meanwhile the world comes off

your petrified flesh like pearls.

Something passing overhead,

a cloud of cumulus flowers.

It’s hard to negotiate a private and

unsubstantial grief.

It’s like putting on the wrong body by mistake.

It’s like crossing into air and not knowing

what you’re making the crossing for.

Me, too.

~

The antler blooms on the body took over the entire

—if, indeed, it could have been called

the entire—

in all the cymbals, there was only the great force

under great constraint, love comes, tumbling, through

large crests of the filigree of

Or what came after then, folding

and buckling as

the weeping cranes, with tips that sweep

to the side among reeds

might find a place between sun

and hydrangea bird and sea