Will Listen: No Cost, No Catch

[1]

my middle american city, small downtown, clear
pockmark free pavement and brickface, uncrowded
air above symmetrical city streetlines, here

light moves through the empty body-space
of soldiers somewhere abroad: deep desert,
sandstorm weathered rocks, scorpion-faced

and falling ever into sand, slipping
toward the autoclavic center, molten back
again eternal, ephemeral: 'burn' is not enough;

creases formed in the coarse fabric, time
coheres around the pink rose bloom, dissipate,
the accretion of ash unfolds the mountain flat

and ripples someplace in the oceanic dark;
scour the chalk flaked pages, the water-written books
for an eschaton's coordinates, the map-point of safety

that hides in your body, embedded beneath skin
and spirit bespoke by imperceptible growth
of trees rising from the moss and muckgrass;

as the millimeter bug clings to the coffeemug,
twenty times toeing the porcelain perimeter
above the steaming black, so too you return my stare

with quiet constancy; bodhisattva peace amidst the city-rush
laps against the shoreline of your soul, whispering
through your ventricles, a rebellion of quietude;

with warm bread, ballast and seafoam
we unfetter ourselves into breath, evanesce out
capacious and comfortable in our negative capacity

[2]

I broke from the tenets of the city,
washed myself up on a black sanded shore

and then I made way, I carved
a space in the air for my body,

moved about among the tree branch,
slid down the water-rivulets worn into rock

only to wake in a sun-lit forest
of people contiguous as quilt;

the acorn's center, the foot-clapped pavement
hum something sorcerous, framed from inside

as the tree-bark hides an outward expanse,
as under us air around arrowroot gloams;

some substance half outside of me sings
and spurs a nascent sentiment

like washing your hands in warm water,
like familiar arms round the waist—

let yourself glory in the opening day