Blood Orbits. Ger Killeen

cell,

      the gnomon’s testscalpel.

      You listen for silence

      where the crowing calipers

      browse on the zodiac.

      You feed yourself

      through the pummeled lips

      one more night

      First Flesh

      Hand—terminal azimuth

      hiving the new verbs of plenty:

      cast, grasp, cup, rub between the fingers...

      and so it is a pitched brightness,

      part salt, part spilling, part

      disappearance into some cut less

      known than night which migrates

      out of the pulsed breath that was

      all you sensed of the other side

      of the infinite margin.

      Tenebrae

      Hope-hours. A snowy hum

      darkens through

      the companionable chatter

      hedging us off.

      Poised heronlike above

      the sense-rifts

      your mouth zeros in on

      a breath’s hesitation.

      I lie with you

      in the unquotable instant

      before a vowel, kiss

      you out of hunger.

      Twinberry

      Ravenblack. Gleaming.

      To eat is to become

      speechless,

      as though you are caught

      in the seahiss

      between transmissions.

      The blue jay fanning

      his blackish headcrest,

      the smell of an alder

      catkin, a face you love,

      dissolve in the twilit

      sibilance of the same word.

      Once, early Summer,

      each of the yellow

      tubular flowers was the paired

      node of a new phrasing,

      a tenuous, exact rendering

      of promise. Once.

      To eat is to fall

      somewhere like the inside

      of a stone, gray and amniotic. Seahiss.

      Without end.

      Seahiss engorging

      the lungs of myth.

      Winged Book

      (for Sandra Landers )

      From somewhere beyond

      the roiling origins of bone

      and need, where all the oldest

      hurts and breakages

      root determinedly,

      you wedge a blade of flame

      in the impossibly thin

      season between words: This,

      then, how blessing can enter

      the tumult of our days’ lost

      answers to hearts that plunge

      along an arc of senseless

      pain; this then how flight

      is possible again beyond

      reason, how blue exclamations

      leap into joy, praise.

      Figures and Grounds

      1. Vendémiare

      What begins as your heart wanting

      to be heard

      out, finally, beyond all

      capricious arrayals

      proves the devil to redo:

      you step into the street

      and find

      you’ve accomplished

      a kind of bolero over and above

      the specific blessings

      of freedom (search, seizure,

      silencing, etc.) that coagulate

      into magnets for good

      sense, boutique art.

      The other year, you unlocked,

      let’s say, some old alchemical emblem-

      book, its tendons rubbed

      raw by innumerable pressings, and you

      couldn’t resist adding

      a pinch of your own dirt,

      smartening it up

      for the next performance

      of Vive L’Humanité.

      And what is it you see

      in the other focus

      of your elliptical flight

      back from the republic of afar?

      A well-appointed loft

      in the fourteenth arrondissement,

      a wife swallowing a sabre,

      and taciturn daughters

      with gold nipple-piercings,

      lavish Ukiyo-e tattoos.

      2. Brumaire

      The storm discovers

      its voice, and the meanings

      multiply gust by gust.

      It all becomes

      a city of one dream. Think

      of sleep as a fire

      whose blown white heat

      brings out layer

      after smudged layer

      of sentences

      quilled in citron inks,

      book chapters, perhaps.

      The lucky salvage

      fistfuls of smoke, pen

      them away inside

      the orbital cavities

      sunk in lovely skulls. So many

      eyes the color of parchment

      perching like pigeons

      on spires, on ramparts,

      so many chilling nights

      of hilarious weeping.

      3. Frimaire

      You are received, shown

      in out of the night air.