garden.

combing through your multitudes
i find the seedling unfurled
voluminous mass
flowering each depth of my bones

scratch this sweetness
with claw discordant
and fumbling, charcoal impulse
constructed so willfully.

a study of the dancer in early morning.

bent upon herself, nose to knee, palm to arch, a sigh graces her spine.
the dancer is snapped cleanly in half.

a familiar tension combs muscle, bone, vein.
it catalogs previous adjustments.
it finds root in flesh yet unaccustomed, and plies through each resistance.

she ripples in her stillness, extended in arm and leg.
each tendon a flame, bound for exhale. 

there is soft light; it skims her cheek.
the oak floor seats odd little objects; two silver ribbons, hastily spilt, a tarnished phonograph, small and inexpensive, a pocket book of music, threadbare, cover crumbling.

these speak to her of evening.
she knows the rushed footsteps, escaping into night air, bustling in a desire for day's end.

and always will her desire speak of morning; warmth, in aching light, pull, in beauty unrealized. morning, flooded to bursting with brilliant vacancy.

morning, the breath wherein passion breaks forth day.

southern song.

she bled and bled, brick dust red
combed bayou, in night-hour blue
(patron saint, whispered faint)
knelt down, swept ghost-white gown
she will pray, love come to stay
and that devil wake, her soul to take.

photographing your ghost.

if the love were complete, there may be no search for iconography. awoken from the dream of you i have been awoken also to desire anew. to know you, to form you where your body graces not.

you have been the unmovable, the irrational depth of sadness, the vessel of my blood, intimate.
and yet also, you have been nothing but breath between my lips, the vapor which ghosts my skin.

i search to know you in other means. i have held cloth akin to your scent (for to me the color is indescribably your ether), i have sought words by which you become luminous (for to my rhythm you are verse), i have grappled with and never garnered you.

i realize, the comparisons which render my revisiting of you so richly, are my divination. these speak of metaphor, useless as it is accurate; not personage, imperfect, irreplaceable.

the season's first snow

winter
like roughly drawn breath
has some great comfort to me,
(speaks of fired hearth, muted embers)

let us lay covered.
i kiss your skin
in dimming light

we glow as though lit
from beneath ourselves
 (quiet)

such softness.

opiate.

smolder with me
each eye dredged in khol,
shutter slowly.
you're all sorts of metal
lead-limbs, nails sharp,
glitter your indecency.

vignette (pain).

her depth is concerned with moments dimly lit.
sadness edges seductive, her fringes crimson and veins fixed; this brand of stagnancy comes of love only. her movements stilted, sharp, rather like a film in stop-motion.
she bursts forward, shudders back, the ballerina on pins, a Monarch firmly pressed but fluttering.

the wrist dissected. there are surges here, where the bloodline lies, reeling in forced cycle (though this barrier, most penetrable).