to be written

when i write, it's perhaps the only time
i don't think. who taught me
this secret? how did i learn
or discover the privacy
of language? a trapdoor freeing me from
impinging traps, keyed to hidden chords and
verse disguised as clamour.

surrounded by intimacy, lost in story.
alone, i disappear into a world
where even i am a stranger, though here, identity
loses its clout and swagger. each word a
capsule of past collapsed beneath possible future.

disguised structure revealed only through notes
in the margin. a long, sideswiping glance can mean
everything. pause there. put down what you're reading.
the book you were given may have been
the wrong one. how long have you been studying?

i move away from the text, like spokes off a cartwheel,
like blades off a fan or floating wing. i move out from
my self spinning each piece, each
select rhythm, i am moving.
not thinking. i am writing again, history
ever carried to the present by small things: a seed hitched through
the fur of a cat. a stowaway bird echoed through
the hull of a barge so long at sea. the verses i whisper in sleep
til they wake me to find myself already reaching -- not for
pen or paper -- not for light; for my own pulse.
that beat cut loose and lifting out from my grip.

i'm blind upon waking - brailling the
shape of each word in my heartbeat, clear as effortless music
and all i am doing is feeling.

how do i share this? i cannot keep that which keeps me nor
can i give it as it guards me from all that i love. it's
enticed me with its terrible proposal of secrecy
in separate hours that still, finally call me to intimacy.

pacing privately through my own version
of myself. guided through water with
minimal effort; a mother with
her infant in a green pool turning
slow-swoosh circles. my shadow lets me
go; sends me out seeking texture and
light - sends me out
from a core of memory that stores
life in splinters. fragments of music,
a litter of tones. it's all
sun through the branches. it's all jokes
and stories begun, trailing down
to forgetful overgrowth before reaching
any destination. i keep beginning with
this feeling: giant songs building nests,
resettling to digest broken off hopes in
scatter; restless integration. a malcontent at
peace in moment's pressurized; released
to stifle time spent, to send me slipping off a
glitch in eternity's upslope - a stitch in time's
side, a joke to leave one in the stitches
dropped time's nine saved again, if only,
if i could only recall
how it ends.

things i do

to avoid discovery,
i hide.
to discover things for myself,
i hide, for this is the way
to become a croanie of the hidden.

it is cold here. cold is good for its want
of fire and so i build. i read the coal flames.
there are words in them; they form and fade
in less than an instant. you must read very quickly;
very quickly or by intuition; let your heart feel them
like speech.

i feed the fire with dry branches and spare change.
pennies find their value in heat. they turn over, turn
color from copper to blue green
like the color of dark evergreens,
like the ash that fell
behind my eyes in fever as a child.
like confused waters
reflecting dusk where i reached to retrieve
something
under the water's skin. seen plainly but my hand
came back empty. that trick of
angles in water's deflection
that keeps fish safe from spears and wished upon coins
undisturbed at the bottom of fountains and wells.
once wishing well beyond my hopes,
i groped like that but you were not
where i thought you
would be. funny. now my wishes make fair kindling.
let the flame's tongue unroll the green story
before my rapt witnessing.
I'm all eyes;
listening.