Our garden is a fairytale this
morning, misty and faint

like a Japanese poem. You can almost
grasp the moment: Scattered last remnants

of moonlight on pond water.
The peonies painted in blotches of pink.

Stay inside. Watch how life
starts in secret places. Blossoms lather
in sudsy layers on the bare,
rubbed-raw knuckles and fingers
of the cherry trees. The flycatcher
outside your window sings whit
or clip or whee.

I don’t recognize myself
in the rosy sunset, nor in the sliver of half-
moon dissolving like a wafer
on the tongue of twilight. I recognize
myself in the peeling bark
of the Sycamore, each layer shredded
over the last.

In Lamson woods
I cross paths
with a man hunched

under a neon
green umbrella.
It is raining…

every afternoon at four. Her name is Maria. She tells me my mother hangs
in the crown of the Sycamore, watching me. My father is there,

too. I can’t see either of them, of course, though I strain, staring into sunlight.

Once I felt the pulse
of a dying songbird,

my finger softly pressed
to its throat.

The sun’s lips kiss the earth
goodbye so fervently
they bleed

Stars sparkle with glory
but are dead
and don’t know anyone’s story

Prayers burn deep inside the throat like votives.
Identity is a peg on which we hang our time.

A murder of crows dressed
in feather tuxedos twirl
on a dance floor of asphalt
in a ballroom of snow

with the stiff and scarlet-
clad corpse of a doe.

My heart, like the wildly pounding sea,
is a metronome measuring brevity.

I rest my head on my own skull at night
and sleep not an inch from my death
as a scorpion lives with its sting.

Music is composed of notes, the body
of dust motes. Arrangement determines
color, size, shape. Open the shades.
See: dust motes twirl in ball gowns of light,

No matter how much you add to hate,
the final sum turns into a fraction

while love is a substance that augments with subtraction.