Unless You Catch the Darkroom Spirit
Two times blessed and I’m wired in.
Snow’s swallowing the doorframe
and I’m tangled down. A clanging
in the cellar and I’m loosened up.
Your canines at the collar
and I’m quiet now
*
Hardly hunger I
responded to
that morning that safe-
light as it filtered
used to be your shoulders
when the negatives approved us
to compare to takeoff
with the deep as with a garment
*
At the limits of the lamb
one eyes closer
to the aperture,
stepping over soot and all
at once unplugged from zero,
it’s another aliveness
piercing the picture-
house, unsheared outlets
feeding in my quiet
like a softer carnivore.
Say “mine” again
the storm dies too
*
Can’t follow can’t follow
cold light flipping through me, can’t
cordon off the turbulence
of photons in the shutter, can’t
I slip a little on your music, what catches
in the body’s wilds, snake-eye sniffing
precious at the neck of, prayer of
*
Some alphabet corrodes
this photo of my body
(three times bidden)
punctum where the air
forms a darkroom outside
the wind’s left open
all night, my boys left
to roam the mercury-
me unsees me from this
shape, printlessly
and giddy too
*
Tonight you’re not the same
you transubstantiation.
You’ve lost your sentence
and your cards.
Tonight the air is not
retained the same way.
Molting from the corners
of the envelope
to field the edges
of repudiation.
*
Buried back
serrated fang
his tongue
done wedding
species lack—
walking thru
if spit
were true
I ember-waded
frantic summers
petaling