I feel hollow in you

your emergency of tree with seed

your petal hips

your penrose tile of iris

When the long wing of the wood

dresses you again in our garden

and the clock has carved its note

the ground will fill me

Ten twenty four

I heard an ambulance, no.

Two.
Something moved inside the walls, unknown.

A student of the dorm sneezed
and coughed.

The waterfall of high pitch
began. Stopped, began.

fa;;,
I was
noticing
the
sound

twigs departing severa;
                                          ;eaves
in
human
                      form

swam a ground

Mind: a
game between
an
island and every-
thing
else

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.

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.

to possess a will can be made like iron
in the heart of a very old sun
I traveled through rings and haze
looking for a tradewind curling boldly
at some horizon whence blind to me
slipped ophidian beneath my feet
a shade—
the philosopher's boot struck face
with a lonely looking sound
and clear annunciation
rattling the deck of a turning sunship