If Excess Burns Off What is the Fire
Real Geology


If Excess Burns Off What is the Fire


All surfaces slant, sink in and sidle, How
many letters equals one night together

With one corner missing the other corners
of the square are no longer corners

of a square, Salt draws the water out
I stayed home to write Flaubert is said

to have said yet we know all language is
excess except in the case of increasingly

sophisticated ways of saying hey I love
you I miss you how was your day speak

me back to sense again, make sense of
me, And have the sentence's continuity catch

as a sidewalk's continuity allows one
tripping to catch himself running, There

is a man eating a sandwich in the crosswalk
couldn't wait to cross it or eat and

man gathering cigarette butts in a pile burns
them rubs hands as for heat though it's noon

Real Geology

"It flowers hard." Wickets of tulips, withering berries. Even what doesn't repeat is a pattern.

Song: Whatever love there is is love enough. Humid day now words sunk in sky particulate as pills in an opaque vial, and imagining's harder.

*

Recall your own time anywhere different for anyone. Geraniums on a sill. I don't know if things are worse than before or worse because of before.

Pastries like shoes in the war museum, pickled ginger like doll skin.

*

To read a poem, nail the book to the wall so it is open (it may take three or four nails), then write the poem you want to be there.

Here is the difference between despondence and correspondence: a few letters. How in every poem there is a resting heart rate and a running one.

*

Tiny leaves splotched like Petoskey stones (every childhood has its private gem) press shadows on the road. The color here, tourists come for it — its prettiness drifts down slopes, complicating distances, though real beauty adds to miles, steepnesses, not like this flattening afghan on the ridge...

An observatory is just a telescope

*

We know the prehistoric earthquake occurred in March by berries preserved on toppled trees. The library, a twenty-storey tower, is "settling down with the weight of books its architects didn't figure."

The heart attacks similarly: too large grown, now hung like leaden plums on a balsa frame.

*

The skin peels back with ripening. Letters signed now yours, or is it years? As clapping keeps time for a breaking voice.

Sun like the gold plate dedicating a bench. Overheard: "Bring your own ambulance."

*

Overheard: "How many types of rock are there along the tracks?" "Not enough."

Doctor says, on a scale of one, I have lived well. Have nothing. Tap my knee, I'll kick up a little dust of song.