Like that piece of foil, stay with me, on the ground
By the dumpster, that’s what sunlight does
When you flay yourself on it, little by little
Over months and months, steady as its passage
Through the smoke in the air, plain as the air
On your neck, can you feel it, like the little gasps
Of Saturnine lifeforms
Throbbing together in tiny clusters
Deep inside a frozen moon, their one thick mind
Like the gut of a gnat, the gut of a gnat
Like the neck of a clam, like the long tunnel of flies
Floating above the wrack line, I’d like to think,
After all these years, I understand
What poetry’s for, but really I’d rather die,
I’d rather die than understand it isn’t hard to find
The suffering I want, a hand
Moving always to cover my mouth, my mouth
Moving always against one wet hand, always the method,
Never the end, not like visions but like sounds
Or like the privation of sound, like the ash
Of the cigarette that’s its song, it’s the ash
My skin makes where the ash
Meets my skin, it’s my distance from the song
That’s my song, it’s the spell the wound makes
From my skin with my skin, it’s the song
The ash makes when I cry out
Oh Measurer! My God
Is a stone, but He is one of many stones, and I was wrong to ask
As though I could choose, as though it’s the pain I sought
That will change me, the sea as neglectful as the mind
When it comes down to it, the sun a mere
Product of the air when it comes down to it, what do I say
To the dirt’s bones beneath me, what do I say
To the pigeon that needs me, I will not
Destroy you, sweetheart, I’m sorry
I’m not there right now and I regret what’s happened between us
In the mossy grove of my desire
Where I look and look for
Darkness, where I find, eventually,

Darkness, where I want precisely
Not to see but to hear, not to hear but to touch
The forgotten fingers of that which rises from the water
To say I love you, Horror, my matrix
Of invincible sorrows that looks like Memorial Drive
When it rains and the water runs thick on the road
And the cars gorge it up, you look like a dog who looks
At me with its bulging martyr-eyes to say My angel
Of the meadows you miss so much, I will return to you
In the clamshell’s bleached ridge, in the dust of the path
In the overgrown thicket, in the interminable ring
Of the buoy through the brush, in the sumac’s dark fur
And the dogwood’s red empire, the flowers’
Circular charters, the wild carrot and clover, open me, brother,
That’s what I’m for, take my crypt and my pocketknife,
That’s what I’m for! I’m related to Jesus,
Whore! There’s no going back! Turn oh Lord,
Hear me oh Lord,
Here I am oh Lord
In Massachusetts
Drinking from the cup you quit, and haunted
By what I cannot see, and changed
By the world I design for us—listen to me—
With my small hands and dark boots, SELAH.
.