Matryoshka
Exiting Your Dream toward a Better Morning Is Simple
Pull a red alligator out of a python with both hands
Its undigested leather
will make you doubt your imagination
That predators contain us and we
contain predators and predators half formed
After Acts of No Recollection
Explaining takes too long
Let’s say moose antlers as big
as a rib cage
A car throws itself
into foreign material
as if hoping for metamorphosis
In a way yes
Everyone involved
With Moral Turpitude
Hounds perceive all scents and all scents
as equally strong
There’s this mistake
I walk to the European boutique
through people’s back yards
and don’t know where to look
I close my eyes
which makes it worse
Listen to a neighbor’s oven
clicking on and straining
to reach its temperature
Now Uncle Val Loses Count of His Terriers and Hounds and Sheepdogs
They’re indecipherable sleeping in the barn
or crossing hay fields to be a creek
by being in one
Like Daphne
a skin swaddles them in names they don’t respond to
Charting Hadley’s Weather
The Connecticut River’s immensity opens up in January
to the foot of a mountain
like a candle
Something to compare oneself to
in passing on the highway
Breathe in its still being here
A Focal Point
A dozen sepia-toned lamps are on
in a Kharkiv apartment
The residents partially asleep
watch their rooms unhidden
and stark as stars
if you forced them into dawn
Daytime Gaining
Also water blooms
into three-quarters of meat
and leaves a quarter for blankness
We gasp on
about trains’ trembling and imminent
arrival
at Lviv’s station
as individuals
One widow occupying a balcony
Around her the city
gathers a thousand of those balconies
Letter to My Father
A memento mori
is supposed to be motionless
but I don’t believe in more death
than is necessary
The matryoshka doll
of saying goodbye and goodbye
gesticulates
its floral selves apart
A Rare Leopard Steps into the Shade to Escape Her Hide
I don’t want to know what becomes of you
becoming someone else’s start like an end
Lively Way of Being Awake
This stomach churning
Above starvation at 9 PM
Notice skin changing its color
A neuron or enzyme dimming
As some other light comes on
Waning past the granite peaks
A minute ago I’d forgotten what I was
Fact of the Matter
The barn is drowning
because it is
in fog
urging its particles of light into the road
as an SOS
drivers take as beauty
When the Owl Calls Your Name
A cure is imagined
as much as a truck stop
What you do when you get there
is what you were doing on your way