She is the word signifying a moment in time, darkly scanning the heavens for a release from sealed lips, the rough winds we use to push her through rooms of you’s– she suddenly halts on the ends of our tongues, just behind the top row of teeth, and lingers. She is the word for an unexpected brightness, an inconsistency measurable to within a second of our blotting her out with our giant fat asses, just trying to scoot between. She is the name of that pull we sense when we stand at the ocean, or on ships, at night.

What she wants: to know her name. She is already advancing across the sky







Be the subject of gravity and the object of looking longly. You are held within the same fabric as she, but you have a different name.

Forget about your own name. No one cares.

We shouldn’t shy away from things just because they are clichés…but maybe we can do better.
She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes, that is we will see her first upon the mountain’s peak. And we will feel her entering our throats, and we will want all at once to speak her as a noun and verb, qualifier and particle, adverbial and conjunction.







Oh she is the MOON!! The moon. The moon. The moon. Of course she is the moon, she is the name of the moon. The name of the moon. But if the moon is a thing, and its name is “moon,” and if she is this name, then “moon” is not her name. Her name is what names the moon. I am only just arriving at this thought. I’m sorry if you’ve been waiting long.







She shall have to look for a driver’s license, a cable bill, a tag in her underwear.
She shall have to lean in closely to hear—causing massive tidal disturbances, shipwrecks, tsunamis, the submersion of archipelagos in the west—but she must ask us.
She must expand her place on the page.







She sits moonzing on the parchment. Nouning her every moonly position. It moons a dance.







She begins to wonder if the way to learn her name is to follow the distinct abstract forms scattered in the ocean after a tremendous run upon the rocks. That is, we do not see her wondering. We see her recognizing the shapes in the water, then we see her diving in after what looks like the mainsail.







She is already wet, we cannot wet her a second time. Perhaps it hangs in the bubbles that float relatively freely above the word of her name, and the words of the names of everything. She is the moon as sister, she is the moon of memory, how many copies of her have we seen? She is the sad white moon. She is the moon of wolves, and so the moon of vicious men, and so the moon of blood, and so the moon of origins, sustenance, regrets that we chew and tear.







[You missed her.] Well she was there. And she looks like your mother and she is very concerned about all the things you want in life. She told me so. What’s important to you? Children? She told me she loves her children. Not only that, she loves your children, and she will do anything to keep your children safe. You can understand that can’t you? If I had only told you that she remembers her daughter by opening a blue diary to the page marked by a crushed violet, and reading aloud the words “tomorrow is almost here, and then we’re diving into the ocean, but I can’t sleep,”—that she keeps this diary with her and rarely opens it during the day—well then you could not have managed to be her, not even for a moment. She is making models of herself out of Styrofoam, and plans to display them for everyone. She won’t need to leave the house ever again, and we can be satisfied for a while, until the novelty wears off.







We will have her reach into a hat and pull out a name like “Julia.” We will have her smile and hold it close to her heart. We will have her warm and understood. Do you understand? She will finally know the mystery. And we can forget about boats and bubbles and moons, oh especially moons! And just focus on how this moment can be placed on a shelf, in a book filled with other such moments, someone having scribbled a caption next to our faces.

It reads: “Not Windows!”







Why, she wonders aloud, the less like my body is my body the more it rests. The moon is not as bright as a blue candle. The moon does not fall on, look on, shine on, shine on. Moon is moon. Moon = moon. Now relate this.







And so she is the name of the moon. Julia, or something. She learns this by mistake, but she was also trying to find her name. A happy accident. Just like her children. All of whom need names immediately.







She tried to kiss her son, but he was cold.
She buried her daughter in fire. Julia the mother, moon the devourer.
She wants to be.
And when we comprehend existence, the scene will end. Or else when we are finally denied that comprehension. Either way.







We do not believe in dreams, only things that are like them. She is after all only a symbol, her name only a metaphor, not even a substance. Yes, this is very much like a dream.

the practice is a sorry self

of the absent black Takamine
and soft fingertips
they used to pick tangerines
useless, riddled with flies

of tar pit tracks and sabres
wool to wear in an ice age
and hardened blisters we
climbed, rocks
oh the rocks!

of foxes feet in the cement
and we always lay flat hands
on misshapen earth to remember
that we once loved in a real place

The Real Places, such real places
we have been! Rusted car doors and wet leaves
sticking to our ankles, we clung to each other's coats
and
faces,
torn up faces
in the bathroom, on the stairs, we were all wet, all wet and left
with cement on our feet.

they are all the same face
I culled from a dream

the face of all falling faces,
stars shutting off

at the pale twilight,
just going out forever.

that aged bent and spindly traveler
gray
waxy skin and boiling red eyeballs, I will

kill him with smoke!
kill him with liquor!
kill him with rich cheeses
and syrupy sodas!

his death will glance into coffee cups I will take them with milk and

recall

that there is a blankness ahead
as it recedes
into bondages of bandanges
wrapped burns
motorcycle burns
boils on the hand

they butter you like bacon
and they're planning eat your cooked fingers
lapping up grease
and so
coat their
lips and
tongues
in the
latent
pain
of red
and white
sores
and of recalled dreams. Do you need firmer ground to stand on?

muRMur (a sketch)

and in and in to a bRight wheelbaRRow afteRnoon,
is it, all of it, Really?
to lay in the gRass,
no it's not, I have a pass,
scattered gRavelly shoes thin bright
shadows, I am in the low

murmurmurmurmurmurrrrr

close to the gRound
her Musician's chin Resting
on the black body of the guitaR
and I can't heaR heR, but I love heR

haven't had a dRop
the heat dRip of

hot coffee
waRM tongue
cool wind
bRight blasted day...

i don't need to taste it,
the poRcelain scRape of
Mugs And sidewalk ceMent
Makes enough to iMbibe.

joe is like a lion--pondeRing
caRolyn is the Roof of a tRee--editing
and what i Must be is
those scatteRed gRavelly sandals

in the hallelujahs
of iRonic pop songs
the subliMity of tasty sandwiches
Rolled fish pRessed flouR
Rice and
thai beeR laRd
tequila

it must be traveled

I am determined not to leave you messages

and into this illness body I place remembrances
holy, dates and times to match these dates and
times, imagining self as a series of identical
circles. It is not. Rather a coin, caught
describing the curve of a vortex in the wide
museum funnel near representations electronic
what the fly must see with her many little eyes
near La Brea, all this will sink slowly and
viscous into steps untraced, the body of it
filled to calcite bone, life organism, life
recalls organism, life,
I loved you this time last year, this time last
year is not a real thing, nor the year before
nor the year before, but a bookmark, and a
bookmark bought in the store with a repeat
customer card, I will collect ten million words
and none of them were yours

this is where your fingers think of pipes

This is where we come to kiss. And this is where they go to die. And this is where you buried Jasmine, drifting East in a metaphor. This is where she rose from the grave, covered in snow. This is where you saw her ghost. This is where you came in a pillow. This is where you came to die. It is where a baby shoe balances on the knob by the crosswalk. It is where coffee stirs and your fingers think of pipes.

Nervous, slender fingers. Guitar fingers, you think. And the girls who wear long jackets with short skirts in the winter, handing out pamphlets at intersections. Delicate, deliberate fingers. Cold, drinking fingers. The callous on the right middle finger--your pen callous. Your words make alterations to your flesh. These fingers don't take rings. These fingers age without your lover's face to touch.

This is where you will stay. There is no need for stolen moments. Baby, where is your tongue?

On balloon hands. That rubber, stretching and snapping, wet, sputtering, dusty, sticky, static feel. She has been living in those warped and elongated distances. Has begun to believe that you exist without touch.

How dare you try to break that silence. Don't make us laugh. This is where you keep the rest of it to yourself.

As You Begin to Disinhabit the Air

And it was the picture I did not take of the girl at the tea shop that I search for a place to hang on my wall.

That you knew but said nothing.

I will count the times I did not touch your face. The little restaurants we didn't visit in the afternoons. The necklace I meant to place inside a tiny drawer for you to find.

The nouns you would not call me. The verbs of course un-acted.

The window we never found a moment to sit at and watch the rain, which never fell so long as I knew you. Those Texas thunderstorms I recalled but which kept their distance from that room I less than inhabited.

The flower I could not find the moment to place in your hair.

These will all fill the spaces of my new walls, and I will carry them into the town and set them in little paper boats to be carried away past the folks wading in the creek. And I will carve them onto the sides of mountains with a long finger, the one you nearly kissed, but eventually refrained.

You are full of wonderful thoughts you never had, and overflowing with words not spoken.

There is even less air here. Where I am. Perhaps not merely the altitude.