Winter Vocabulary

Winter Vocabulary

Snow heavy skin the branches my fingers

bent to the page, intestinal sound

of snow thuds from the silence the heart

you can hear it far off weeping for the

plum tree as it scrambles over the mountain

thinking over and over

we’re going to lose a lot of branches

who’s we?

but whose branches they are, our Norse grammar

a mangled tree and a broken heart.

A black branch scribbling between the pages

between skin and skin, I almost wrote sin

making the kind of letters you need a bible for

such dubious morality as being

tree, me, a severed hand writing epistles on the yard.

Whose yard? the hole from Ptolemy’ s compass

snug somewhere in a book of skies and you thought

you were watching geese migrate, o ruddy researcher

as my footnotes track your rocky spine barking their

fearless nonsense in your no-nonsense ear.

Whose nonsense? but the where of it, and who

I understand you with, you who is the next word

bird, angel coming in through the window

and I’m pregnant with you reading the book in the sky

it says we’re going to lose a lot of branches.

There you have it, all the wisdom in the world:

you is we is they, unruly bones grow in the distance

between us, all that wood and pining away words are

so there’s no mistaking what I mean, what I really mean

weighted to the ground and how I wanted

as you lifted your heavy boot and stood over me.

The way you listen to the bones in your magic hand, pillowed

to your ear scripting your dream with their spell

which also means fit, and time, the way I

crouch here mad with the thought of you

how my skin melts on yours, my preposterous cold skin

herringbone and yellow cashmere

listening to the girl’s booth drink their milkshakes

who’s going to be a camp councillor next summer. And I’m

still there. Listening, listening you all over. Go ahead, talk to me.

I’m still everywhere, a black mystery weeping

in the crushed grass, on the dusty flowers still

for sale under awnings of 6th ave., so cold it hurts.

That’s how it’s supposed to be: remember in that hurt

a Venezuelan gardener, someone in a dusty old picture

that person about to turn the corner of 13th street

the way someone always is. You remember

from a sharp piece of everything I am

a sly gnostic cupid pierces you with such arrows

an icicle above your doorway where will be a puddle 

at your feet. Just stand there and fall in love, a puddle of ink

white ink of nowhere, invisible ink

to write the world with, the invisible blood of the 

invisible wound from the arrow you are,

wounded by everything you see I’m sorry.

I’m sorry there is only someone else

makes your body a pleasure none without this hurt 

this first anything pinprick my poor body I was wounded into

and only you can heal me. Lies? Come over with your proof. 

Subscribe me to your tree, you the branch I never knew I had. 

Healing is remembering. Healing is remembering.

O Adam or Madame in the christ-pain of matter

tablets of bone hearsay of your legs

re-learn me what they still write, about the

prayer answering sky

my head bent against the starry ceiling 

and constellations of nerve-endings

festooned above it the way meanings spread under

a sign like a bruise, how long ago I stroked a star-fish

and the thunder hung like grapes above the aquarium.