Mixed with always:

Your songs
        	are the impossible ruins
        	that keep the hours on turn.
        	Keep awe bare like
sound at night.
The candle burn. Ice
melts and wax. The dirt
on your mind. Engines roll
in clutter. Clank cool
and electrify the room.
We always
become mysterious—
birds at the end of each evening.
Whoever does the telling stops
time like a crescendo. We hit
blue notes so the edges
of your honey jars rattle laughter
against our teeth.
Rhythm breaks
like need or the knowledge
a mouth organ has
about breath and tone, blood
and gravity and balance—
all those sweet sounds
that can make even
windows shatter.

Ultra Orator Spell

I become the song I’ve been
singing alone in this field with you.
What deal did we make that leaps
so far behind both into the horizon 
and from it? Some grim comfort
has come my way in the form
of an ox. The ox struggles to remain
in my consciousness, an unfounded
howl yearning to ring around
a ventriloquist’s echo. I’ve become
too busy for such nonsense, so I cast
it into the places where I retreat myself,
the ecstatic, gratitudinal rest and re-
storation of popular music. My goal
isn’t to unfold popular music once
more, rather it is to speak now to
how the animals say it better. Make
the nominal joy render justice. Make
a joke of nothing. Grade this remark
holding no reluctance today, only hope.

Related Poems

War Music [Down on your knees, Achilles]

An account of books 16-19 of the Iliad by Homer. 

  Down on your knees, Achilles.  Farther down.
Now forward on your hands and put your face into the dirt,
And scrub it to and fro.
  Grief has you by the hair with one
And with the forceps of its other hand
Uses your mouth to trowel the dogshit up;
Watches you lift your arms to Heaven; and then
Pounces and screws your nose into the filth.
  Gods have plucked drawstrings from your head,
And from the templates of your upper lip
Modelled their bows.
  Not now.  Not since
Your grieving reaches out and pistol-whips
That envied face, until
Frightened to bear your black, backbreaking agony alone,
You sank, throat back, thrown back, your voice
Thrown out across the sea to reach your Source.