Chapter IV: Calendar in Couplets

"I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments," —Henry David Thoreau.

"[Leave] holes & gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, or thunder in," —Dylan Thomas.

January

Elevators bleed landscape into plasticity
& lonely girls swim in the perforations between souls.

I am an altar that employs a body
where she can flood & swallow me.

My mother reads January's violent mouth.
The river's mouth surges into me.

Her imagination transmits news
but she retains possession of emptiness.

The sea moves the sky before my shoulders.
I take the television into waves.


February

In the echo of your arm
I face blindness in dead space

& gather fresh darkness
for light to spread.

Rain passes a transparent secret
& cleans your teeth

with limbs of wind.
Transparent leaves water

my head answering a question
you want me to communicate.


March

The factory dissolves into theater
& requires my body to drift into burning snow.

Such accidents ignore my mouth
as the world is attached to the sun.

& trees touch light with leaves.
She sleeps through my legs

on a day of psalms & pillboxes
dancing with cashmere & midnight.

A poem to connect absence.
An American vision long gone.


April

You visit fields after the map delineates boundaries
where a fragment falls across a dream:

fur on emerging waste
an epiphany in junk mail

the confused postscript of souls
& a backyard for sleep.

An intangible context designs
a story from deletions & breathing

that passes lines from me to you
in a space of language & memory.


May

Patterns build meaning from impulse
below the graves of a river that

does not gather knowledge from water.
The color of morning is streaked with water

& dresses you in a shadow.
I can hardly stand it.

This instance of surface encases me in you
but my new body is an experiment.

Your shadow left for someone else.
I soak my clouds with geography.


June

Sew my mouth with wire
etch my form in water

plan for nothing but sunlight
urge red to understand red

replace everything with ghosts
awake my dragons at night.

Like water open to form
I remember only ghosts

in a poem.
America doesn't want to leave.


July

Water awoke in my mouth with an extinct vision
of you amid dreams & words.

Names of names burn my window
she denies her body when I promise water.

They say Sleep is a night of wakeless stars.
I say Sleep is a bed bleeding absence.

& by the edges it's easy to get lines wrong.
& by myself poems are all together transient.

Water walks on skin with reluctance
while memory cleaves her mouth with myths.


August

The river drowns in a rusted metal tin
as her heart slips into my mouth.

Cigarette flash lungs vacant windows.
Words adjust the aesthetic of my body.

They say Nothing binds us to dusk.
She says Morning expands between sunsets.

& by the edges an island becoming leaves.
& where you are is a flash of memory.

She left exhaling to cigarettes
& killed her mouth with wire.


September

I am a graveyard of American
lives built adjacent to the lives of

broken moons & morning breath.
A form broken in the footage.

Mouths speak sounds as if songs
& I rewind her heart asleep.

America is a confession
in ghost limbs

a machine of circumstance & poems
a smile in the dark.


October

My word is not for both of us
but it folds dark into your memory.

She imagines space away from space
& dreams the floor away from beds.

You say I form my mouth with trees.
I moonlight her in the shadows.

Writing between soundlessness
waves outline your mouth

& call her memories empty
all until the body falls from within.


November

I sleep myself awake with dreams
& collage my face with morning.

A sentence unseen is a form of beauty
a potential country of words

a speechless moon of shadows
my shoulders untethered from the sky.

She does not know about the dark
or the sleeping speak she seeks

but while we wait for gravity
the wind reads lines of space.


December

We forget because we thought.
The sky feels the wire in your mouth.

We collapse into water & context.
Water lights you from within.

We taught unbroken mouths content.
A sentence lines you as a poem.

We no longer lament our disenchantment.
Language lives in an image of you.

We broke water under the moon.
Sleep wove you from the edge.