Things having to be returned to their transparency:


       _i.
       / green mist-earth / knit
        atmosphere / fathomless
        blue-lavender / lights
        spun out from light


        _ii.
        are recalcitrance / and you
        are convergence


     & - a fingernail of summer
        - a melting of rain
        - a crown of flowers
        - a priest of sunsets


(beautiful? I love you, because. Zemi.
Zemi. are you beautiful because I love
you? Zemi?                                   )


       _iii.
       I imagine this is what it's like to breathe sea foam
       over the Cliffs of Moher: hydration. absolution.
       To Rilke, it's a melody that floods over us
       when we have forgotten how to listen for it.
       I never could forget this: for how could I know
       my hand as both well and chasm? and how could I know
       time, a windstruck dimension, standing in her white street?


       _iv.
       We go on morning walks and Zemi
       laughs at everything I say. He


       wears it on a cord
       around his neck when he sleeps:


       my omphalos of rainwater,
       hyacinthine blossom on his chest,
       his bioluminescence tearing on the glass;


       beneath him, the city
       rumbles and the infinite



       _v.
       When we go home to zero, what seraphic voice
       will declare so clear our unbecoming?


       The places Zemi has been to, again there
       he will go,


       bipolar god of
       flickering lights,


       saint amid rain
       and incongruence.

The first winter was composed of sleeping,
flower-like, but this second is like prowling
the gap between feeling and thinking;
limbering up the dawn, unscarfed, uncoated,
with my head like a getaway bag, hastily packed,
a floppy trammel of tossed lists: lists of lies
told and believed that have since
turned into calcitrate in unsunned cloisters,
and I should know the dawn because I've seen it,
and I should know the gap because I populated it
with crows and left-behind items of clothing.
It was like dismantling a spiral staircase
step by step, leaving a sequence of hollows
stripped of the season's riverly cadence.
So I have myself to blame for this desolate winter,
because I thought I could be solved by the same process
by which we build bridges to unnamed places:
one slimy brick before the other, incomprehensibly;
forever imposing axiom upon axiom onto that plane
until the equinoctial day it answers back.

We lost electricity on the night you left me
and I spent the night curled up against the rain,
drinking in the slack of damp green winds
in our treasured driftwood home of mist.
I had to come to think of time
as a medium and my thoughts as
imperfect and cursive. It was a wrinkled medium,
a mediocrity of sunken breath: words condensing
into droplets that so contorted my teary lenses
that I couldn't tell that you were turning towards me

with a sound, the sound a book makes
when its leaves are rustled against the grain.
Tonight my body lingers on the edge of the ocean
like a gasp; New Jersey's throaty highways
bear my rosefelt thoughts and I can't miss them
like I miss the cradle of the river,
like I miss the firm grip of the circular,
like I miss the existential faith we had in nature
and her artistic lover to take us home.