You try to pull meaning from things,
and it falls
so fluffily
apart into fingerprints.
While painfully scaling the cryogeometries of Mt. Foxglove,
you let your arms spool out as fluff,
and in fingerprinted anger
they let you.

As if around were here, she said; her man

took off, dissolved into the film. Hemmed

frowns shimmered contagious. The birds began

to be remembered, upsetting above

the cutting room, which pitched and spoke dust

eyelashes moved. Outside wings brushed

paints off Allegheny, in crypt the lust

coiled round and wound around a jamb ordeal,

clipboards stuttered, and the reel went silent.

The door was locked into the building,

pulsing star ice clicked in a bird eye. At length

an ET moved to issue a command:

What you have seen remains here forever.

The bird's poisoned by a bit of clover.

That's a lot of heading south,
I said.

The birds were on a telephone wire
downtown at a festival
they had joined,
a gladiator's match an echo.

I wondered if the birds had any friends.

The sound parted.
I watched several hundred black
butterflies take off.

In seconds they had settled—
were settling along the wire
like magnetic soot, tracing it through the back streets drawing
on the late autumn sky
falling in the evening gold leaves.

Again, after hopping lines to see
the creatures went up in a vapor;
I ducked when they flew at my loft,
my heart smoked when the pendulum missed.

Eventually they did leave. They lifted themselves up
like a giant stalker,
hung in one dizzy
bulb,
made an acrobatic revolution,
and tiptoed off like a cannon.

I am a cut. Dirty blood is all my failure. I am bleeding scarves on the wind in the water, luscious red scarves taking my failure from me. The word suddenly is beautiful, a state, an entry granted to the queen. La Noblesse, Her Fairness. Why be afraid? Why be proud, ashamed? There is no shame in a dead end, a quote of nature, an icicle. In the heart, an icicle. Flagstones covered with it. Growing.

In Wrangell-St. Elias:
a 380 nm octave burning
sporocarp hills, a lensing
wet lacquer above.
The black hole at the center of the Milky Way
spun its mass microscope
to catch a zoom photo

and this is how it looked.