Door in the Mountain. Jean Valentine

we broke up

      it was as if the last egg in the house

      got dropped on the broken floor.

      This world is everywhere! the woman said,

      You won't go unsampled!

       So many secrets

      So many secrets

      held you in their glass

      Fear

      like a green glass

      on the shelf

      It hurt like glass

      It hurt like self

       Eleventh Brother

      one arm still a swan's wing

      The worst had happened before: love—before

      I knew it was mine—

      turned into a wild

      swan and flew

      across the rough water

      Outsider seedword

      until I die

      I will be open to you as an egg

      speechless red

       Once in the nights

      Once in the nights

      I raced through fast

      snow to drink life

      from a shoe

      what I thought

      was wrong with me with you

      was not wrong

      now

      gates in the dark at thy name hinge

       Under the gold

      Under the gold and chalk and brick, beside

      the rowers on the river,

      the black lines lived around my crayon bones.

      One line. And then my heart shut down,

      even so, inside the lines. I rode

      out of the sorrowfence blue

      twine-tied gate

      into the river grass…

       The Windows

      Funeral dream

      “We'll put them all down in the great book of sleep.”

      “You may be dead but

      Don't stop loving me.”

      In memory

      “Don't hold yourself cheap.”

      All the windows came to him in tears.

      The chestnut tree by the North River. Its tears.

      Dream A bricklayer. Your father.

      Dream “If you shoot someone

      I will walk out on the ocean floor

      and throw the gun away.”

      Dream “When I am of doubt…”

      Dream “Go clear.”

       Go Clear

      Go clear he said

      his high gray 19th c.

       postmortem jaw

       I loved it its high grayness

      go clear no touch

      but words no more

       death fear

      I swam out of the streaming ikon eyes

      who loved me: not-me: no more care

       I left the clothes

       standing there I swam

      into swarming projectless air

      redemptionless

      from under the earth to over the earth

      air to not air

       The Coin

      While you were alive

      and thought well of me

      there was always a coin in my fish-mouth

      off in the night

      or the day lake. Now

      the little coin doesn't need itself…

       October morning

      October morning—

      sea lions barking

      on the off-shore rock

      Autumn evening—

      seals' heads nosing through

      the pink Pacific

      I gather myself

      onto my day raft, your voice

      lost under me:

      first other tongue

       I heard my left hand

      I heard my left hand love for my right hand

      white through the screen door

      just as through the summer elm you

      two years ago in the bardo

      moved into the room we once had feeling for.

       In the evening

      In the evening

      I saw them

      their little

      open boats

      carrying us

      across the blood water

      their invisible company

      their invisible company

      you beauty I never

      did not know

      no time

      no place

      you beauty

      little ferryman

      *

       We cut the new day

      We cut the new day

      like a key:

      betrayal:

      We went ahead anyway

      drinking down the will of the event

      On the eighth floor

      something fell

      alive inside the old street wall

      next to the bed

      I heard it fall

      and fall

       Occurrence of White

      First thriving, then failing to thrive:

      no never thriving,

      from the beginning,

      the ghost freighter out of Fall River,

      ghost railroad car out of Chicago,

      raked my skin and your skin