Fragment

Let's say this weren't tonight, and I weren't trying to make it to 100.
Let's say that there were something else, not arbitrary.
Let's say that the way I loved you mattered, that the
Glowing port you offered in a storm mattered, that
It weren't you, anyway, I had looked to and tried not to keep in touch with.

Let's say, for instance, the words alone mattered:
Let's say, "alone" or "leminiscate" mattered because
And only because I like the way they sound
And hoped that you could too.

Let's say I could write poems that were virtuous, that held themselves above
What prose does, more than how I show a child
That leprechauns live down deep:

Memory play

On the highway hitting high speed,

I like the break of engine just before the car begins to shake,

take corners too fast,

talk to your ghost,

Think, whatever happened to the way that things could be?

Tell me if you mind the smell of smoke.
Sparks shoot from the glowing end, and I turn off the music,

Try to concentrate,

15-12-15, numbers in succession that work out leftright left,

The distance between each turn reminding me of worlds that could exist

At every stop.

For twenty-two miles I heard

The story of a car,

And found what it means to drink a voice.

I could feel the alcohol take hold,

Answered you when you were gone,

Felt every moment become a shudder,

A whisper of affection.

"...there can be no independent reality known as 'time', as if actants were driven forward by some temporal elan or duree, some flux of becoming distinct from their total reality here and how." - G. Harman

If we had no other words, or breath to take,

I would still speak to you. I feel the break of moments

And the end of lines, where each one stood the way

it could in perfect silence,

Unapproachable, mute, the dream of a memory

perfect and forgotten.

If I had no other choice in life, I would have touched your lips

Have traced myself and found myself again in eyes,

Have loosened myself to your fingers.

I'm all awash in a false sort of spring,

As lowly as the water I stomp,

As loud as strong as the warming winds.

Each moment becomes the last, I want

to feel to fuck to fight to burn

against my skin.

This is the mania of spring again, Can you keep up?

I'm okay with a few bridges burning;

I've been the student of gossip all the snowy days

and watched the subtle words of arm brushing arm in classrooms

And now they burst into sex and spring as I watch.

Let's sing some things loud and out of tune,

feel the tiny gestures only for their worth against the large-written words

Of Chinook and early thaw.

Thaws conclude in cracking:

Snow descends to slush descends to slick spilling

smooth

ly

sticking

ing to each step.

Dusk delivers a thousand solitary sounds,

The last licks of light bleed and die across the snow.

A lack of Faith, perhaps, or the lack of touch

Lets me feel the light on my skin.

You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? - Cormac McCarthy

Late winter lessons in weakness:

An icicle will snap under its own weight.

Late winter and identity:

No too snowflakes are the same. The secret,

though,

is no one cares -- unless you try really hard, each

becomes another,

reflecting white glances of all you've seen before.

To see the similarity is to see through a lens of desire,

An inconstant urge to want to want not to want or just to want.

the way it whips along my windows shows

the way the wind has wants, to enter, penetrate and pull

itself as deeply as it will go,

dissolve into the air I hold in here.

But no matter how I breathe it in, I cannot hold it still,

It is not me, no more than you.

Cars

Slipsliding across icy

Streets

-backandforthandback-

and hard

bodies slipping

but never quite

meeting

into each other