Solar calendar, i

It is li xia

And the land is stretching out on

Its plain longitude

Calling for evidence from the

Buttressing shadows

Like an engineering corps

The thrushes are already

Rough-legged in the summer-heat

And pooling rain

The yueji is banding the cultivated rivers

It is with this care you pack

Watermelons into a box

Aired-plastic like I’ve never seen before

The snowish texture of it fills my mouth

Cold, warm

Unwilling to move

The season’s progeny

A kind of stillbirth

I cannot figure out the mood of li xia

Though I know its inclincation

Accurately

A song’s title

They chose to sing

And only sing

The song they know

And I danced to it

If only I could dance

If only I could sing

They sing
And wish that
Only song exists
And I did
I danced to it
Its violent arrogation

Of drummed beats

And not tomorrow
But today
I borrowed from today
And I sang from it
I tried with
Horse ropes
Of a native voice
To ready something
And fill the room
To plant the root
Of it

And I grew
But only knew
Only song exists
Only they sing

If only songs
Were everything

Window

When you look out

And see the flying trees

Think of me

And its every answered shape

And I will think of you

And your arioled breasts

And your nape

Shorelines

Mulberries ripe on frames
Like asphalt in color or texture
Clusters of majesty, mundane almost

Winds that remember this place,
Since we will become artifacts of winter,
Since we started looking at the toll of summer

The thawing of humid seasons,
Changing lines around the fields

Such uncertain boundaries

A blind masseuses’ hands;
She is old and feels such pain

In unmarked shapes of your body –
Man or woman knows

I draw maps, as I always have, in black lines;
Black arrows and curvatures
That are strung in
Gestures around a lake,
And nothing in the middle –
The lake is an empty space
of deceit

Flipped curls of water come over
The surface and the channels of sound live in the trees
Around there, alive in the bramble
of shores, and never far away
To allow you to give or gain shape again
To the ultimate mastery
Of hidden images
That speak with ease

Nobody

Briefly I know you

Up
A wasting satellite in searing dawn
That crack of first time
When we harvested our shadows for knowledge
And only knew the scale of the universe by our eyes
Ascending in guile to measure cosmic facts

A track of love that lifts light
From there
Suddenly, where history was perforated
By the pressure of blood
Making dilation of every fact a hope

Our burdened private knowledge
That touched and knew at once
The sedentary call of home
Roofed homesteads
Wrestling on a prairie with grasses

But, out in the universe

Particles of binary collision
Brushed the theory of everything anew
Pulling the light from quantum fluctuations apart
At ends in pained loss
Careful not to ostracize mass

Then
All the collected things
Under glass, bundle together in microscopic color

When I pass you on the street
It’s like we’ve never met before

Matrimony

Against all better judgement, yes.
The loins’ will trump-it-all sanctioning it,
Brought us to this portal of ourselves,
To self-serving love, warm and arrogant.
I cannot seem to fetch your image now.
The days come at my feet, betraying
Remembrance – in skittled hours – not like long ago
When frost howled onto the calcified pane.
Now, you will not believe my delimited face,
Cracked as a moon each morning
At the jazz-dreaming of others’ limitless
Lives, who are heirs of secret bargains.
Lost – we’re no more; our age has developed
In trembling hands feeling on, for flickers –
As the television’s, before I stop watching it,
With its spooling bright spontaneous tricks –
Adverts, non-consequential, playing up a crowd –
Sixty hertz of vertical frequency hissing color,
A baritone in box, and you fixing the cord
And antenna, to control all its noisome blur.

Aging

Then you reached a certain age
And the past was longer away than before

You didn’t listen to its keening until now,
But then you’ve never wanted to listen;

Now, like old forsaken things
Years that grow dilapidated like abandoned buildings

It’s as if all the old rhymes
Are too obvious to hear;

You keep strumming on thwarted strings
Secular drums taps, tit-tat tum-tum

Glancing at us like we’re sidelong shadows
In the glow of evening,

And its a song of sorts
Running through derelict rooms to some

Other location where life evidently goes on.

Distance

Junk her journey
Shot through with holes, dull points in her arm
Sounding soft with white dust overcast
As silently moving across a Milky Way
She knew once the anniversary’s symptoms
Glistening swagger dew of them
Blades of grass in jute morning
Actually, every morning in the mundane world
Contempt the one
When she listened to
The giddy in his hands,
Wet aroma in the land
O, splendid roots
Bog tenuous, sponge, nude
O, trees – no birds in the silent orifice of Space
They fly as autumn flies silver satellites to winter
On sprung hopes, gadfly illusion
She knew solid earth had not abided forever
Idle in dominion
She knew not what stood on it once
Singing in daytime if it or she had heart to sing
She sang the silhouettes that queue in distant shadow
O, her body a mirror in as beautiful a story she can tell
She counts, finally, the distance
An import of measurement
Of feeling embracing him, any way

A Dig

Call what strangers’ call
Unbidden near

New words that speak
New words that bolt from ears,
Great bells in large domes
That peal for weeks

There’s not one of us
Outlasting our days
Narrow monuments
Call for our release

If time’s some time
I’ll go measure lengths
Find marrow tunneled-in
Fixed under lime

A mound eternally
Buttoning the earth
Keeping what’s down
In strict fraternity

E-104

I’ve reached a point
Where dark matter
Holds pleasure on a string
From a gaudy petty knot
And the thing waits
In hope for more
Than what’s allowed
It has become more than a sacrifice
To live
A self-catering
Defunct extinction
Remains part of its half-life
An aqueous black magic
Of heated bodies that collide
Like Argonaut suns
Like gallons of light
Flowing through dotted pricks of space
And a tempest unbreakable
Doused black scions
Of eyes closing nimbly on a corona
And into flames
Like a body forsaken to it