The clearest photograph of the sun
looks like a head of hair, exponential
strands of burning flares. Once, I looked up
Cancer rising bald, curious to discover
if my astrological placement that determines
physical appearance leads to baldness.
Instead, countless links of people with cancer.
I can be dumb, vain, clueless. I watch videos
of strangers climbing sickeningly tall infrastructures
without harnesses and my knees go weak. To flirt
with death like they have nice teeth. Upward starlings
levitate, spellbound. They flock in great formations.
Solemn, humbling; here glued to the grass, its blades
intonations of future lives; to pick one from the earth
and scythe it gently across my arm, this earth moving
so slow beneath us, these deep shadows of summer dusk.
The clothesline & its bleached sheets haunt the breeze.
The jaws of bumblebees sheathed around pollinated
tongues. I was fluent in my own self-destruction.
I remember where I began: a dark gloom of stars
roaring wild in the night, all beams of light gossiped
around the ancient gravitational lurch of the air.
Alone in the lawn gleaming blue from the July moon,
I imagined all the worlds beyond our own: the lost addresses
of our past, the translucent curtains of windows fluttering
in our excavated sternums, the night & its mirrors poured
in the forests where I once explored the bone of summer
listening for the struck axe; when I heard it, it implied
my tongue spoke of nothing but forgiveness. Yes, our fathers
exist there, stranded inside the television screen’s smolder.
The gasp of cold living rooms, they die slow deaths,
attuned to the clarion of felled sycamores: some might
call it beauty, beauty extinguished with the flick of a wrist,
the cavalry of the future summoning, or ice-coated lakes
cracked by footstep, or the fearless climbing those buildings
without hesitation, these buildings that we’ve built
that could reach the clear eternal, the complete unknown.