The woodland remembers me. It smells me, and remembers. I can hear the shadows turn bright, the low pulsation of the trees, the hum of the leaves, the scumbled treeflowers alive. The deep grasses camouflage the snakes. I buried you in tone-deaf sound. But it seems I misspoke, or spoke to soon, or spoke too much, for you lie with me in the deep circle and would not get up again even though the combustible treeline froze and the record kept skipping and my skin started to burn.
1.14-16.2006
everything would be perfect
if not for the storm inscribed
on the passing-through kiss
of the bullet. long ago I left
my light on your tongue. you bend
over our narrow hole (I will bury myself
in your garden.) gravity spreads its wings
and crashes. I ricochet across spraying
sand; the combustible moon chews dogwoods
and caresses the fat grass. the fraction
of us thinks it can feel the pause between dreams
as we stand soft against the rift in the winter sky.
the sun darks, tone-deaf rivers purl across paths
of drought. under water I see you. I would say
a prayer but it is the same today as it is all days;
night cracks over my head like a baseball
bat.
11.6-7.2005
and no windows
in the room, he says as
salt-cracked earth
pours from
his mouth in chunks—he is
formless, with a melody (tiny and dead)
that he will
open while resting
among the black-eyed
Susan's—imagine, then, febrile
green fields with wrought iron
flowers poking through...every time
I answer,
a too-thick
hugeness swallows
itself, muttering
pseudo-scratch-syllables,
the front and back of my throat
rubbing against each other
the way a bird rubs
against the sky, the sun's tongue
licks the horizon: an arm
of shadow across the intricate gardens
shaking, he
walks across
the dirt path he makes
when he speaks a yellow shadow.
entwining itself around
the sunny white sepulchre,
also no chairs, he says, looks
into my frosty smile, semiluminous
and carves us out from the dead, five
years, nine years, windows lit with fire.
10.25.2005
Michelle Greenblatt is the new co-poetry editor of AND PER SE AND, formerly known as "mprsnd". Her first book brain:storm, went to press this January. Her work will be published in these magazines: Kulture Vulture, Dusie, Xerolage, Moria, Peek Review, Naked Sunfish, Fire, BlazeVOX, Word for/ Word, & Admit Two