through the blue behind my eyelids,
i reach for all of it—
the hill of ivy fat with wolf spiders and sow bugs
hollow bones thinning under the cedar
raccoons washing their fingers of fish
at the water’s edge.
spooning the thin lines between things into my wet mouth
and spooling them haphazard around my teeth,
making a golden net of my throat—
i must have turned my brain into this mess:
purple an octopus’ cheek and also
a bruising scar from falling along the creek
not duplicated, just
synapsed in some misfiring imagination
they won’t catch on the heavy films.
in st. paul, the tiger lillies begin to bloom. i imagine instead
the alevin’s yolked throat
oyster mushroom squatting against a nurse log’s back,
slick and dark with rain
nasturtiums crowded thick along the estuary’s stink
the quickest short circuit nostalgia buzzes
and winter crawls out of me in a silvered run
sharpens itself at the back of my skull.
once, i picked a tongue-pink petal
from a rhododendron and touched it to my own—
i was always growing where i shouldn’t
thickening the string between each disparate thing,
like my knee a facsimile of st. helens’ shuffled
summit making me ≥ a mountain—
and in this tube, my stomach green as lake light
still incubates, seasonlessly, the flat leaves
lying in wait for the right flower
or the most poignant tongue
or the good brain
whichever the pain can invent first.
here and back then, i have the most golden throat
where all the places are one place in the swallow.
they won’t see it in the reading,
the light made up of so many knotted strings so as to build the hottest sun
ruining the images like too much hell—
i exist in an overactive hemisphere
i do feel the suboccipital light, a daybreak.
it’s just not right here, although my blue fingers always reach
even as i lie metalless and still.
