I fell into an if

If
there is
a lazy wood
here layered around
these more red than green
glimpses into my clouded falling,
I haven’t spoken it aloud
or tasted its sweet
and fresh lack of effort
in bringing me down
to the gravelly rasp
of an unexpectedly
kind streambed.

No, not yet. I haven’t.

For my words wouldn’t,
they couldn’t make it out,
screamed or murmured
as summer soft
and impecunious as
the soonness of this
coolness that swallows
my wrists with its newness
and impresses my palms
with the painful clarity
of its hard
at work
if.

Reading into the sun

With color, it seems
to bleed the blame from its ends
of days. It’s blameless.

Many hands make this light work

False judgments

This pigeon, otherwise
gray, has a fluorescent green
on its neck, as pretty
as any humming.

A disembodied voice has nothing left, or right

We make frequent stops
along our ways,
all the different ways
each of us has to go,
and even those few same we have,
and when she says it,
when she helps us with her
my’s, we listen.

The moon’s lost face,
she’s lost a little too
of her orange glow,
grown paler, yellow
but not any colder,
since I last heard from her, both
different and the same, as when
I was headed another way.

They say, or have said,
in some made-up way
and place, these frequent way-
stops make it easier
to keep track of
how far we’ve come,
how much face the moon
may have lost, or gained
along our ways.

My faith comes in leaps
and it keeps me
imagining her voice,
so pretty, with its accent
I can’t place, there before
she lost her body,
the body that lost the hands,
and sides, she likes to speak of.

Her blood left too, or it moved
onto colder solutions,
and what was left, and right,
is now dissolving with the ease
of this steel and glass
sliding open to let in the air,
not salted here
but it could be
when I’ll go another way.

For you

For you,
I could slay
a mountain's doubt
(thinking it's a hill).

I could move
a dragon to fire-dousing
tears (telling it all
I would do for you).

I would hazard the moon
can't once in its blue self guess
how I'd go about plucking it
from its purple perch

to present to you
as a sorry present's
starry-eyed promise
of a future

with all I'll do
for you.