The Art of Swaying
You show us the ultrasound of the river and the stream,
the belly of the woman who lost you,
the place where you find the hairs
from the back of her neck floating like leaves,
the striations of her irises in patterns of mud.
Later, you might say that the surface of the moon
is a love letter in geologic script,
imprints of bird-claw and rock-dust,
remnants of everything split into two.
But tonight, the room is welling with sorrow
as you sway to a melody that doesn’t exist,
the sounds lost or forgotten like the people
who live off the land in Virginia,
their arrows and pelts and unshaven bodies,
their tents a circuitous network of usable things—
like the cavity of the body,
like anything needing to be filled.
Love in the Time of Redaction
There are things I want you to know
for the sake of science—
like how I want to reach across the aisle
and feel your pulse,
offer you secrets about the body
in exchange for the formula[s] for happenstance,
whisper the energy of unnamable things
into the room.
We become the subject of research,
spend our nights laboring over
a theory that’s yet to be written —
the ontology of a ballad or the lamppost
outside the bar,
restraint in its weakest form,
facts only discoverable in footnotes,
our secret desire to redact them
before placing the book on the shelf.