Voices In The Blue Hills

This is the place for translation.

For making rubbings of
things into other things, other forms.

Where the skull gets translated
as leaf and log, where lists of my gentry
are unraveled
and dispersed like seedpods. Where gravestones

sprout like hens of the forest.

All around me is the unbrushed
hair of years. Bunched, yellowed. This, too,

gets translated

into words and bodies
as I lunch in the abandoned stone house.

Why have I brought these terrible
apples here

to eat alone?

It is with this question that I continue
with my work. Push the softened

blue hills at their rest
to mold with
future’s unloving blueprints.

How Many Of Me

How many of me were there
when I came out?
Flailing and reaching with
how many hands
at the glowing streams of light,
eyes flickering
to the
tunes of autumn?

And was it a terror
to see me there, upside-
down and shaking, gargantuan
mass of myself
so gustily birthed, with so many limbs
and so many eyes, and to
kill all but one
and
allow it to leave?

One ingenious invention
from the
billion-celled
ocean.

How many of me did you drown?
Bury without marker?
Did their toenails drag when you
hanged them? And with how much
rope?

There is, somewhere,
a photo album entirely of my
portraiture. My
likenesses;
which, every moment, expands
and enfolds.

Will they march with me through the years?
Twins masked
by the blurred cone of time’s hat.
Roaming like invisible clocks.

A layer of feathers
growing upon me in equal number to they,
and to years.

It is good to die with
eyes open, they say—and my eyes
were open. Taking
stock of the
moods and allegories of this world,
this sparkler in the green night
towed behind us.

Learning To Write With My Left Hand

In the dark, frost coated blue.

Fish meander
about in the
tank, dulled blades of the tropics,
murmuring
in only
cheap silences.

I wait and watch my brain
record its solemn, loyal functioning;
oh, how cute. How brave.

Muscles twitch like violin strings.

The lamp just
went out
in the neighbor’s window.
I didn’t even know it was
on to begin with.

And that box of tissues on the
bequeathed dresser
looks almost morose; but maybe
that’s just because
I know who brought it there.