Do No Harm
As if the bird were not
in one room, but many, and making the sound of many seabirds
pinning dunes to blue and vibrant yards of wind. That sanding down
was why,
was surely what I felt the credo
was, no mean or desperate motion, no graceless
tangling in the rafters, but light as fire to an open flue,
the relic beehive feathering up
to ashes in the draft. This was where
I told myself to live. And pressed my life to going over
everything I did.
Chair
The chair is a gesture. Of all
the motions, there are two hands always
pulling the chair out, or one hand saying, Sit down,
it’s free. Now its wood shines with absence.
Now it hardens to oak. Of all the wearing evenings
and mornings, the chair, unlike
a boat, is never named. Years pass and the chair goes by
in duplicate, profligate, a map of lowered anchors
printed so small they look like stars.
Compounding Pharmacy
Disquiet adopts a whetstone’s grit
An undercroft had better be what you think it is
A timepiece cleans its feathers in the spring
As a windfall is wise to attachment
Attachment is a metaphysic hunting from the ground
Unsound Supposition
Dampened drums
of thunder, strong sheets of rain
you eye through the front door window,
numbering the obligations to a house. Unsound
supposition, that this overflow was caused
by leaves. Cleaning the gutters, you’d had two
wasp-stings in one day. The unaggressive
paper-wasps had only just derived the delicate
umbel of their hive. Acid for wasp venom,
alkaline for bee. How deadly sweet it is,
a datum, so way beside the point, but pointed
nonetheless, desirable stings of quibbling,
quarreling, jockeying for the smallest powers.
I read that Petty Dancers is an older
name for Northern Lights.
A whale had fur. A whale was once
a proto mouse.