And I must outrun the nuns. Somnambulist with
a mouthful of pinkish scrid. I should never 
have returned to 

this world. 

I say there are images thrown off the bodies of
objects, the pellicle swan brushing the pupils gently.

Insensimus, a dark air hit hard in the sternum keel. 
Atoms atone the spot was there & the bright dots 

were there all along. 

Plotinus says nature roughs out living bodies, but it is the 
pendulum in dreams that goes missing, the cyclamen of
my tongue.

And alone it was the abbess alone chosen by lot, 
a sphinx wandering far from her hive. 

Nobody yet believes save the calico fern.
My saints, I could have begged them to 

stay becoming air.

Would you concede our having looked
alike in azalea swale, & numb, 

there being an etiquette to 
admonition.

And so the dream of a vast intimacy begins 
to vanish, 
taken into the wane. 

Hoping a little drift, horizon in hand—
together on high gray rock. 

Come back, pirate, I can’t. 

The cowardice of strangers perched on the little fence 
dividing our devotions accordingly adorned. 

We hemmed the crash, 

sent it across its ravenous fraud forgiving fond, with 
octagons of triage from the sugar in
our marrow fist.