Daylight perforates siding despite
the battered armor of license plates–
corroded colors, same state: decay,
their dates the only history
of whoever tilled the soil

On a brick street slicked
by a reddish, spiritual neon,
I thought I saw you again,
bareheaded in damp weather.
I recognized the shape
of your breath in the cold.

The garments worn in flying dreams
were fashioned there–
overcoats that swooped like kites,
scarves streaming like vapor trails,
gowns ballooning into spinnakers.

It’s the metallic hour
when birds lose perfect pitch.
On a porch, three stories up,
against a copper window
facing the El,
a woman in a satin slip,
and the geraniums she waters,
turn to gold.

My spectators loved my Orange County neighborhood
in the sluggish melt of summer:
avocados thudding to earth,
bougainvillea petals browning the asphalt,
the old woman with Aqua-net hair
hosing her Bermuda grass.

I don’t remember learning how. Only not knowing, then knowing. Before: lines chickens made in the dirt inside the coop; circles and triangles I drew in the garden mud with my fingers. The only meaning attributed these symbols, that of a child’s whimsy.

In a few days,
someone comes to crack
our shells and reunite
us as a family.

The blue forest, chilled and blue, like the lips of the dead
if the lips were gone. The year has been cut in half
with dull scissors, the solstice still looking for its square
on the calendar…

The curtains belly in the waking room.
Sails are round with holding, horned at top,
and net a blue bull in the wind: the day.
They drag the blunt hulls of my heels awake
and outrigged by myself through the morning seas.
If I do land, let breakfast harbor me.

In winter a crow flew at my head
because her fledgling warmed
the brute nest of my fist. Ah,
the pear clipped in her yellow beak
fell from her cry of “Ransom,” and
I freed my bird for grace.

Suddenly the stairs seem to climb down themselves,
atomized plaster billowing: dust of 1907’s
rooming house, this year’s bake shop and florist’s,
the ghosts of their signs faint above the windows
lined, last week, with loaves and blooms.

Wrapped in gold foil, in the search
and shouting of Easter Sunday,
it was the ball of the princess,
it was Pharoah’s body
sleeping in its golden case.

her eyes of camel and sand
of stars of flame in the dome of night
and speaks to her of a fertile oasis
as she draws the shade and shuts the door.

…O suck
the air w/ punctured lungs
& call it singing
I tell you grace is what the cannibal
names his dinner

you are my bread
and the hairline
noise
of my bones
you are almost
the sea

He has built altars beside my bed
I awake in the smell of his hair & cannot remember
his name, or my own.