5 AM
And you can
Hear the sky at 5 AM,
Crackling soft sienna,
Muted and mulled,
Burning, cannon glow
Muffle-dulled behind the
Brown clouds,
Like
Embers in snow
Mummified in
Soundless
Apple cider
Screams, and the city
At 5 AM
Sleeps sleepless
As it burns.
Love Song
Little bird, little bird —
You and your little raspy
Song, your tiny button head,
Your corpse so china-fine
Upon the wet grass, your
Tea-cup skeleton so prim,
So thin — are more
To me than so very
Many things.
Ode to the Cold
They curse you, poor darling; they
Hate your sharp bite and your milky gray face
And the way you unexpectedly curve
Around bare ankles. They shove you aside
And spit in your lonely eyes, and still, still
You watch over them every morning. I suppose
You can’t expect everyone to understand,
But still that doesn’t make it very fair.
They curse you, poor darling, but I —
I am in love with your pale arms,
Your frosty peppermint glaze icing over the sun,
The strange alchemy by which you turn my solid breath
To curling ribbons of incense,
The way you take up the light and make it fall
Like powdered sugar over the land. There
Are few things as romantic as that white sugar
Dusting my hair, settling upon my eyelashes,
And I just want you to know that today
You painted the clouds the very same wordless color
Of everything I’ve ever hidden behind my eyes.
Control Burn
In the space reserved for
The occasion, still strewn with
Last year’s Easter eggs
And their months-old chocolate prizes,
The unbeatable Aura lay out thick
As a mist on the moor,
Thick as human sight
When it blinks once, twice —
And then no more.
In the garden, bruised but exultant
In its periwinkle scars,
She did not wait for onlookers or even
For the sun; she required no
Witnesses for this sort of work.
She swept away the old eggs
And weeds like eraser scraggles,
Traced her scars into pleasure pictures,
Every puncture point constellated
Into a cloud-garden dreamy in
Seafoam. It infused the dense haze
With the scent of rosemary
And electricity and soil and bread.
In the space reserved for the
Occasion, she unfolded herself
Erupting into blue sweater fire
So white-icy-hot the air pressure plummeted
Into a confused morning, and the chickadees
Suddenly tore in hoards through the wetlands
With beautiful boisterous song. If you
Had been there, perhaps you would have thought
It was snowing, the fog and the ash
Came down in such thick white flakes.
But you were not there, and there is
No way you could’ve been. All she left for
You are the old mildewed Easter eggs
With their sad chocolate prizes, and the
Faint moody crackle of electricity
And flakes of silent fog that smell like bread.