Future Morning

Every beautiful thing gives us a sense of mourning, because we already know we are going to lose things…

– Interview with journalist Ece Temelkuran

Sometimes I mind watch 
grainy videos of you in reverse 

Shrinking, your steps
growing uncertain

Your body waving side to side
In amber waves

Around you is a light
that has vanished

No house, nothing coming
up and down to gild its soft and rigid curves

But I do not want to write
about today’s eternal darkness

All the predictable disasters
we never got around to solving

I want to swim in the sweet bow
of your lips,  your fat limbs

as they wave helplessly in the air
my voice echoing behind you

telling you without a hint of duplicity
that the future will be beautiful 

A multitude of mornings stretching out before us
unknown and unbroken.

The Season

All the rats run back in the cage
and the billboards blare out 
beribboned movies wherein people
pretend to be archetypal, unbroken.
It's the strangest thing
to be constantly without you and 
miss your dire predictions or low growl
followed by laughter. But here we are
surrounded by winter once again—
the emptied lawns and houses
clutched around electric candles, wood, 
canned goods. Come, let's hide
before anything else is broken, before
streets are suffocated in snow which 
when melted creates a surprising facsimile of God.

Just send it

I go on a walk and you won’t come with
so I text you photos from every other block

Here is the cove with the last 
lonely boats before winter

Here is an egret perched
on a rickety float 
amid ducks

On the playground
a small child hits himself on the head with a soft ball 
while his mother and grandfather cheer

The church speakers send out 
their lonely facsimile of bell songs

The birds are very noisy 
I think they are asking where you are 

You are inside farming fake hops
and I am outside typing this poem 
into my tiny phone and all around us
the world is cavitating, a word I learned 
recently from your father 
when the washer broke 

I send you a photo of the sun 
covering another street in its last ichorous light

All around me people are walking their dogs
pushing strollers bouncing balls riding bikes 
driving home sauntering down the street
talking to the tiny voices in their ears
while I wait for you to stop searching for pixelated truffles
and send me a blue bubble full of your words

Don’t worry too much about what to say just send it

Traveling Light

There was a time before
when I knew nothing
and that was good.

Fire crosses the plains
the smoke
carries for miles. But I
cannot hold it in my arms
or implore it to be still.

Water works its way through rock
drop by drop, the birds
throw their bodies against the sky
every night, and the world
is awash in rumors of pain.

I want to settle in the interstices
everywhere, watch
as the lenticular light
lays waste to the landscape
every goddamn day.

I want to wander
as an amnesiac, the stutter
in celluloid before it burns away.
Not nothing just
something without
everything.

Before Sex

Black shock of trees
Thick dusk descending

indigo through the window
where the wind comes in

a little, next to our bed

January: Jacob’s Ladder

Blanched rainbows of windshield-smeared salt and the timely tiny tingling of the river breaking itself apart in the warming air   its frozen skin riddled with fractures   It is January and under the thick chaos of chill I become a brittle sloughing shell   It is a new year but everything feels old and rumpled   The light vanishes almost as soon as it appears   In the next room someone is always coughing or blowing their nose or an ambulance flies by   its red light and wail stridently splattering the dark   In bed in the early morning we reach for each other   that elemental warmth of being but underneath is the void of all that bodies cannot do or be and outside the windows it is black and mist rises off the water like a plague hissing   I wear white cotton gloves at night to absorb something   There is forever and there is now and they do not seem that far apart but there is also this persistent night that loops through our lives like a syndication  We keep our eyes propped open waiting for the new to happen but it simply does not  
and this is the gift we have been given