I plunge into the night—sounds of wings, rustling,
                           and leaves, dripping into dust’s shower.

If I stretched my arms out quietly, I’d become a living cross.

“Even stone rots,” stone seems to say

They see the hand of John the Baptist, kept,
a bit of sallow skin and withered flesh,

But it’s also how the noisy
crow enlarges the territory

And the house became the spring
night—the hallway a vernal hallway

Like nothing you have ever heard,
the caterwauling of a mountain lion

When a breeze fans the glimmer into a glaring
expanse, the smoke plume rises like an emblem

Wearing a plaster corset with a sickle of roses
curved beneath a breast, you are beautiful.

We all believed, if anyone,
you’d beat the body’s rudeness