a great rose broken by dawn :: and the nest of stone escaped

my flaws drifting from stone to stone—becoming the white sky

waking the mountain to strike a small bell

Guest


before space
the meadows

of our birth

many bowls
for one

grain 
of
rice

the guest
left behind

Red Book

my staircase is so empty of silence

the woman who walks there

seeks more than the red book holds

Visitors


i see them arrive in sweaty rags
like a father and daughter full of hurt
the salt in their bodies exhausted
and bloodless

a dentist drills

into the silence

of my root—

the scream begins

as this white ceiling

those without words

are pointing to

one holds the skin of the child you were
      with the sons of hands that painted the sky

in a nest shaped like death
      night lays its transparent eggs

the garden hardly seemed to breathe
      as i grew and it dreamed and we died

that star that fell up a crooked sky
      into the bed where its heart would stop

slowly up

the ladder

into thunder

was wonderful
to come home
to the goldfinch you've been watching

one burst of leaf fall

ahead of me

that only i later i see as prayer

thunder

elsewhere

chrysalis

shadow

sun

shadow

sun

one

a bellflower stalk

bent over

the flying cloud

the tree leaps

from squirrel

to me

hot pepper

picking

i am the one

something all alone is near

            thus the mountains of my past

                        come true

the sounds of a sail

this day

i put on the sun

i never knew

myself so well   

as in snow

too small to

                        feed a soul    the

                                                            broken shine

stains in your room at the end of the world

why does curiosity nesting in blue sand become egg

holding birth by long white stem

sent an old postcard from the rain to myself

the moment your silent music comes true

mists from your heart half hiding the home of the moon

in the secret game in the secret room your face is circled

nights of love without knowing what a child would know

years bending in the wind from the fall of a grave

gazing at a boy in the insomniac's mirror

empty chairs in the cornfield where childhood begins

a voice in the mirror with tiny cracks

old chimney fires lingering in the alley through november

the only dovecote in flames without a girl's face

holding the eternal kaleidoscope tighter and tighter

studies of happiness stitched into the silence of a white piano

one who never travelled beyond the objects he loved

each end of this fallen tree rests on sky

an early death standing with hands in its pockets at daybreak

my childhood inside someone else never used

an audience reading around the desk of my solitude

untying an old prayer from the rose

memory of falling stars    November    waking the dark water

tell me the stone where i can find tomorrow

the moon counting its delicate birds

shapes the seed to what i wanted

fell until a cloud

come back to see the feeding of the bell

alters the dream in its dark blue cloth

then the cage breaks apart and flies away

drinks rain from blood in the trees

kneels in my hand after climbing up the rain

ferries the island to its blind stone heads

promised the nameless their own door

weeps sand into the shadow with opened eyes

wept a black vulture into the valley of bones 

melts into prayer across the skin of a thorn

waits with a touch in the corridor outside my dream

wakens the voice behind glass at the top of the sea

the color that comes back as windflower

the first sunrise will go on asking an older fire

the long limbs of your light climbing a mountain

where arches come ashore and the saint is barren

plows everything back into the afterlife

sees into a blind eye

you went where i lived when air

will start everywhere at once with breaths to come

wash salt with my final name

finds moss across from a star

the hand i eat from within

one drifting away forms the parade

sunlight crushed down to the unborn

inside the beetle voyages

starting to fall forever if i could be wingless

not yet the oriole before sunrise

having to carry the island to its huge stone heads

like a face without eyes the moon spills its sand

what if everything else was taken out of me except the parade within the dream

isn't God that moment the mirror in your mind breaks

eyes that open at midnight in a room deep in a whisper

i made a man without a face

                                                who sat there quietly dreaming

within a pearl

my silences are sky

                        oak tree with one eye open

isn’t a moon

the choice between

birth and dream

where do the dead stop being dead

                                                                        and marry in wine-colored dresses

there are rooms in the house one should not enter

                                                                                                strong winds that only whisper

who is the owner

                                 of what arises

                                                            between your soul

                                                                                               and the cave filled with sky

when i retrieve my bones from the vulture's wings i find they've learned to whisper

when my heart turns yellow how far will i be from the gaze of the sea

is the voice that speaks after your body is forgotten heard in silence or sleep

the pattern in the rain filling other people    your house goes on to live alone

one can never see all the way inside the tapping of an abandoned crutch

is it a question with the face of a yellow bird that is trapped inside your mirror

i dreamed an eclipse
to see the moon dreaming
some
climbed into the sky and died

where are we going when we get there together

pulse

of eternity    soft

            wrist of the sky

on which         side of death

            is rest

my eclipse reveals what the moon is dreaming    the shine of what cannot be gathered

the wound her cheek left on the moon longs to be still alive

the way to see light was once in the sky    and the moon bright with forgetting