Elegy / Prayer

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whatever I say I keep alive
keeping you you near 
me to the point of me 

never near enough here
am either lost or lost am 

losing you again speaking
if speaking could find 
you if you could be found 

***

summoned in visible earshot
sounds of winter like water
tunneling through the body
reduced to an ear, a window
through which the trees, like 

bony chandeliers, migrate
quietly away, meaning up
as if listening to the sky
as if listening itself might
be a destination 

***

nearer the edge of here 
the body becomes 
reduced to its ear 

how a child hears blood 
inside her cupped hand 
believing she hears 
an ocean, and once 
I was a child you 
spoke to me once and 
since was memory now 

say something or vanish 

***

falls the snow making 
the buildings even taller 
like a mind not mine amid 
its own racket redundantly 
mounting amounting 
to snow for hours 

I wait the day-faded star 
nearly deniable nearly 
once spoken no longer 
belongs to anyone 
say something 

***

a shadow falls from what 
it fails to copy suddenly 
a fact made weightless 

all about the world the world 
people are dying lovers 
at dinner tell each other 
plans to make plans 

what we cannot contain 
we inhabit 

***

but the ear also echoes 
itself a world next to 
nothing to hear 
is a subtraction so 
and so follows the call 

it subsumes called 
memory what we lose 
to recover later a world 
and word to displace 
a clarity I cannot trust 

carry with me 

***

drifting snow locates 
dislocates the landscape it

touches becoming the object 
of its own description 
the imagination craves 

a ghost to be heard, to hear it 
the unseen bird replays 
its rusty gate,its nervous music 
not quite music 

a faucet drips all morning 
television blue 

***

where I am not where 
I call out what others call 

prayer, there is no arrival 
it startles me—the wall 

the way whatever I touch 
overtaken by what I want 

touches back 

***

thinking through the keyhole 
I am nearly but not quite 
alone, no such quiet 
as long as blood runs 
and runs though the body

caught in surrender 
in its own unrest—a breath 
at the center of the room 
still moving 

***

I resemble too much 
the egg to eat now 
an emptiness so simple so 
being idle draws out 
the residual walls 
an afterlife of paper I want 

to hear you as I am heard 
returns to me the fact of me 
what I wanted not 
to become become again 

ungainly being I am