You walked in like the light
From every sun that rose 
This year had exploded
Symmetrically from your eyes
I was uncertain—no I was certain 
I wanted your eyes to shoot 
Laser beams straight through me
It was certain we were soon to be
Bound by something mythological
It was certain that when you moved
The hair away from my mouth 
A locust in your eyes 
Moved farther afield
It was uncertain if one day
We would be saying 
I will not love you
The way I love you presently
It was certain we spoke
The danger language of deer
Moving only when moving 
Our velvet bodies in fear

What things are steadfast? Not the birds.
Not the bride and groom who hurry
in their brevity to reach one another.
The stars do not blow away as we do.
The heavenly things ignite and freeze.
But not as my hair falls before you.
Fragile and momentary, we continue.
Fearing madness in all things huge
and their requiring. Managing as thin light
on water. Managing only greetings
and farewells. We love a little, as the mice
huddle, as the goat leans against my hand.
As the lovers quickening, riding time.
Making safety in the moment. This touching
home goes far. This fishing in the air.

In some other life, I can hear you
breathing: a pale sound like running
fingers through tangled hair. I dreamt
again of swimming in the quarry
& surfaced here when you called for me
in a voice only my sleeping self could
know. Now the dapple of the aspen
respires on the wall & the shades cut
its song a staff of light. Leave me—
that me—in bed with the woman
who said all the sounds for pleasure
were made with vowels I couldn’t
hear. Keep me instead with this small sun
that sips at the sky blue hem of our sheets
then dips & reappears: a drowsy penny
in the belt of Venus, your aureole nodding
slow & copper as it bobs against cotton
in cornflower or clay. What a waste
the groan of the mattress must be
when you backstroke into me & pull
the night up over our heads. Your eyes
are two moons I float beneath & my lungs
fill with a wet hum your hips return.
It’s Sunday—or so you say with both hands
on my chest—& hot breath is the only hymn
whose refrain we can recall. And then you
reach for me like I could’ve been another
man. You make me sing without a sound.

Like light but
in reverse we billow.

We turn a corner
and make the hills
disappear.

You rearrange
my parts until no
more hurting.

No more skin-sunk
nighttime fear.

No more blameless death.

My hair loses its atoms.
My body glows
in the dark.

Planets are smashed
into oblivion,
stripped of their power
to name things.

Our love fills the air.

Our love eats
the deadly sounds men
make when they see
how much magic
we have away
from them.

I am taken with the hot animal
of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs

and have them move as I intend, though
my knee, though my shoulder, though something
is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead

on the harbor beach: one mostly buried,
one with skin empty as a shell and hollow

feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,
I do not touch them. I imagine they
were startled to find themselves in the sun.

I imagine the tide simply went out
without them. I imagine they cannot

feel the black flies charting the raised hills
of their eyes. I write my name in the sand:
Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls

skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky.
I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg.

To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white

petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am

in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.

maybe one day, during a point in time, without a particular point in time, without a reference, a point in time without a point, without a reference, without a connection, when someone or anyone being someone, processes a confluence of points and lines, designating nothing, processing in a process, proceeding in a connection, between a connection and an operation, and an operation and a process, connecting the process and operation to a future, between, voluntary actions and tangential beings, being one of many, doing an extended process, extending endlessly into an oncoming process, into the whole of matter at the beginning of the process, proceeding to another process, beginning with an ending and ending with a beginning, the whole of matter at the beginning without a beginning and / or an end, but an endless string of events, endlessly extending throughout the whole of matter, an operation in constant conjunction with the innumerable outside, outside walls of brute naming, or external objects bumped into doctrines of fixed limits, the discourse of lovers as a discourse of lovers, a constellation of objects, thick in layered shades, embroiled always dwellers, always close to obscure, dreaming merging lines on diverging edges, in the pleasure at midnight sharp, where action is the action taken, where the chains no longer imprison, where there is a constant period in time, that is a matter of fact, in the now, being a period in time, filling a blank now, being now being constant, with a connection to the self, being unintelligible to a definition of the disavowing now, constantly installing sediment of then now, in a make believe intelligible constant, with the nonexistent already mentioned, that has no existence, in the shallow of shadows, in the tender canopy of sorrow, wedged in the future viaducts, at the margins, in the venue of morning, in the palm of one's hand, without resistance or insult, these with a blessing and buds of beginning, in the clarity of hands, in the moment of amino, viewing motion's emergence, emerging in all actions, in all object's inner connection, an object of original connection, without origin, a universal action unrecognizable in action, that is an animal action, that is rock in action, or an object action interconnected to the sediment of all action, no sham or quilt, lost on a rock, living with the suffering universe, suffering with the living universe, on a rock in a house, as a dog or teacher, as a double locked-down disconnect, grieving in fearful hunger, immune in the misery of others, living in past present tense on the geography of cross-town traffic, scrawling daily existence in the moment of being, in the connection of being, being without a specific point in time, being cross-town traffic, or a rock in the universe.

1.
             In the first place—I wanted him and said so
when I had only meant to say. His eyes
opened beyond open as if such force would unlock me
to the other side where daylight gave reason
for him to redress.

                                          When he put on his shirt,
after I asked him to keep it off, to keep putting off
the night’s usual end, his face changed beneath
the shirt: surprise to grin, to how even the body
of another’s desire can be a cloak behind which
to change one’s power, to find it.

2.
                                                                 In the first place
he slept, he opened the tight heat of me that had been
the only haven he thought to give a name:

Is-it-mine? Why-you-running? Don’t-run-from-it—as though
through questions doubt would find its way away from me,
as though telling me what to do told me who I was.

the clock is on time
because the stars fall
because all form forms time
              falls on the body
              freezes a book
              beneath the water
because the water is an organ
because all arguments are similar
              similar singularities
because we can never discover the subject
because
because is always an object
              which is an object among objects
              which is neither and or
because we expect to find a similar
              before a different set of circumstances
              being repeated for convenience
              causing a similar
              to seem familiar
              which we think
              has an experimental conclusion
              similar to a set of circumstances
              based on an object
              that falls in the water
              which is a simile
because nothing is like an egg
              or a concept of an egg
because there is no apparent singular
              couched in a connection between
              sensible and secret powers
because the question occurs in a medium
              which is a thing
              among other things
              multiplied times a hundred times
because
              a thought is an object within a thought
              an oncoming proposition
              of a possible position
              a reference to clocks on the body
              as an object without a memory
              a memory without thoughts
because the future will resemble the past
because we want our colors to match
              because on a supposition
              resembling something that could happen
because the hand that shook the hand
              of another mislaid thought
              is based on an object
              that relates to the clock

because maybe
              what matters is a seat
              in a new convertible
because what matters is good theme music
              an antidote to putting the horse before the cart
              or a thought with an anecdote
because the object could swim before it could walk
              like interchangeable silence is a demand
              for milk in your pudding
because we are doing the doing
              which is based on the bones of direction
because matter is everywhere
              and like a hammer
              we feel the touch before meaning
              remember touch through memory
              as an object with destiny
              that wrote an essay
              something that astonished someone
              that’s now a thought in time
              that has a past
              that’s now newer than before
              before it could ever be a question

We wrote of the facefulls of wind
which would gnaw

the space
which wind fills readily again

space is not place but
is the possibility:

a twig in the sand then
crayon on rough paper

later with blue school ink
through a Parker medium nib

on lined paper I drew rockets
clipper ships, small whales

and large dogs smiling. And
windows against wind

the wind a group of lines leaning
against trees. A shape of trees.

Going abruptly into a starry night
It is ignorance we blink from, dark, unhoused;
There is a gaze of animal delight
Before the human vision. Then, aroused
To nebulous danger, we may look for easy stars,
Orion and the Dipper; but they are not ours,

These learned fields. Dark and ignorant,
Unable to see here what our forebears saw,
We keep some fear of random firmament
Vestigial in us. And we think, Ah,
If I had lived then, when these stories were made up, I
Could have found more likely pictures in haphazard sky.

But this is not so. Indeed, we have proved fools
When it comes to myths and images. A few
Old bestiaries, pantheons and tools
Translated to the heavens years ago—
Scales and hunter, goat and horologe—are all
That save us when, time and again, our systems fall.

And what would we do, given a fresh sky
And our dearth of image? Our fears, our few beliefs
Do not have shapes. They are like that astral way
We have called milky, vague stars and star-reefs
That were shapeless even to the fecund eye of myth—
Surely these are no forms to start a zodiac with.

To keep the sky free of luxurious shapes
Is an occupation for most of us, the mind
Free of luxurious thoughts. If we choose to escape,
What venial constellations will unwind
Around a point of light, and then cannot be found
Another night or by another man or from other ground.

As for me, I would find faces there,
Or perhaps one face I have long taken for guide;
Far-fetched, maybe, like Cygnus, but as fair,
And a constellation anyone could read
Once it was pointed out; an enlightenment of night,
The way the pronoun you will turn dark verses bright.