Rain Shadow Radiance

1. Into the Desert

A bee drills its zero into wood,
the air is poison and flushed with noise.
Not the sloped terrains of our hill-lands,
not the sudden end in the valley, the beginning
of mountain and desert winging the dry basin,
the wind so harsh it is almost successful
pulling out into the air's blank gaze the invisible
hairline of water tickling the sandswept face:
tired and limp, hungover with feverish clouds,
the sky converted into one of us, a
bricolage, a conglomerate, a made-up word, eve-ry-
-thing an amalgam of steady, disordered momentum,
a body of fluid truth lying on the grass
as ants fill each pair of stoppered lungs
with dark jaws.

2. Zero

What is this? A glowing
absence? A sudden diaspora
of rainy refugees from the kingdom
of climate change? It is a dead thinker
that always makes sense. It is a dearth
of rippling wonder that voids the living wind
weighing it down, overwriting
its intense, tangential cursive
with deadened words.
                               Somewhere, the moon
                   must be broken like a plate.
            Scattered above the stars
the remains of someone's life
             mugged like a drunk on the way
                        to heaven, a pack of smokes,
                             a Cigar Nebula, three thousand,
                                       six hundred              million
light years away—
       somewhere the moon
                     must be a hole to some
               distant, ignoble paradise.


3. The Body Collective

Am I not a tuning fork for the old lady
longing inside the hospital's long-term room,
nurse-round, white-wound hell
of syringe, seclusion,
and inconstant sleep? Now I must
resonate with her gazing into trees,
overcome with a perfect, fearful
weightlessness,
dreaming this body into flower,
flickering, in wind and rain. Shadows
linger on that face
she pushes through the window, contained
in a haze, breath-made, and dark frost of glass,
wondering at the sky and its imperfect limbs
stranded in air, wired to nothingness,
drifting, the flowers of ghost-washed trees in free-fall,
in faceless papering.

4. Ruin

Even in this nightmare of an amusement park
doesn't the sky ever get tired of making
all this snow?  

5. Artist as God Among the Dead

When dad saw me drifting among the dead,
still alive, yes, but studying their faces,
obsessed with their fingernails and still-
bloody wounds, he told me to get the f**k
out of his house. This was something that
always belonged to him, a temper, a misery,
the shrug of command, a bitten bit of heart
rusted in time that was not mine
anymore, that he crushed like a photo
of me at five years old, alone in the bath
laughing at bubbles, something small, sad,
a little cruel, but he doesn't know it, a fragment
of me that I was all too happy (too alone)
to leave behind.
                           My father, he sang,
“Don't let the stars inside your eyes,
don't let the moon break your heart.”
But I did, going dark, blinded by large
Magellanic clouds, hovering like a witch
overcome with wonder, weight
in defiance of gravity, the moon
among the pieces of this self, I
was rapturous. I was amazed.
I could tear down the walls of heaven
with a song.