Apollo  

Plough through me a light fissure,
a tunnel whose breath-building
& praises are burdened with locks.
You, bringing that pink fire from
spring-buds, are looking for a fix.
All belt & needle—O, for a song
to enter. As out a mouth, its chirps
rasping against a green door, inaudible.
So what with warnings? You who
would not disseminate. You who
would not kiln & rage. When I walk,
I possess these trees with the death-tune
of a lute. Look. These notes reach
across the forests & fields, some
gloved hand over a mouth.

Transmission

In another world
We will not motor.

—    Louis Zukofsky

All sunsets droop in their day clothes,
shriveled, mundane. What is there now except
consumption—

The numerical rates depict a snorting
of all the shimmering rails of words, rigid
in dust jackets, glorious in light—

Soft as golden pears, transmitting
meaning from inside a humming shed of skin.
I listen to the paring knife—out of fear I listen.

After all, my inner-self, we aren’t allowed
to see inside the design, to hear a single
sonar wave around which the country

protrudes its orders. Please, continue meaningful
work: the running and finding of all things never
seen—the bustling cocktail bar

of syllables, a red carafe of headlines,
the fresh produce for this inner-world craving.
Here, write of the body: a submarine!

Its water must be oxygen. When does
the soul surface, shrilling a breach alarm?
Does it shill out a bag of silver?

Help me make sense of this. Speak
to me, even as a whisper—
even as a prayer, show me

Hushed

Language is the house of being, Heidegger said.

A hole dug in the ground is a kind of house. 

Cost of putting your pet down: one .45 caliber bullet.

We don’t dig up what’s buried.

We don’t dig the bullet out after.

The truth of any moment is image, the eye ushering in the new. 

We forget the old. We don’t dig up what’s buried.

Once, I unearthed a gun in the garden. It shone obsidian at dusk.

The dusk’s hush holds not time, but memory.

A forgotten place where you cannot live.

A moth bumping against a porch light.

A dog limps away into the dust-dark of a tree line.

I can see the tar-papered outside of the farmhouse.

I can see the thumb-smudge of my young smile.

Here’s the house where I find truth (it is rotten).

The sky today, imperfect with pink clouds at dusk.

Traffic in the distance, roaring, and so many people, and me.