Poetry

My Latin is limited
My Greek is worse
And the languages
And signs
The drawings
The bones
We find

Dead I would dream the sky and the sky breaking into flakes and falling gathering itself into fat drops plopping into summer dust the acrid smell rising / I would dream the sky shivered the sky repeated as blue eye staring back as mote in...

Squint, reader, through the sudden fog: 
                            the sea’s gnaw and lick-bright:
Eldey, pillar of stone: where two
                            great auks survive, briefly—
before reenacting the end of their story

& my memories of you are thin as cotton worn with age / & soft / & blurred from too much touching too much wear

Pink millions of passenger pigeons slammed the sun shut again and again for fifty thousand years. Above the Ohio River, a solar eclipse for three days straight as one flock passed over. 

of the dead a million years of age-related faults / danger war hunger lust the extinct fallen stars / everything living falters is always on the verge

Will Smith plays a cop in this movie. We watch him on the couch, your baby sister and I. She, who was not yet born when I knew you best. The speakers make such deafening sound. Subwoofer. A thought couldn’t be had if you begged it.

Stars curl in the shape / of a scorpion’s tail and sparrows / float like gold flecks over the fields. If it's true / death is just a portal through which to pass letters.

& this is what we mean when we say body count. first, a swaddling. then, betwixt damp & ordinary gums hangs a mess hall. we offer a martyr to the blowtorch’s bright kelvin spit and call it supper. an autopsy worth its salt.

Fog flowed in a continuous river through the trees. / Inside the river, a little light. / Light trapped in gray smoke, beckoning.