Over, the kite’s flight; and of a sudden
is the realization of the morning overcome
by the echo of dark nights, silent witness
to the colorlessness crouching down before us.
Stealing time is what’s been happening all the time.
Is it because you’ve heard only your own cries,
fifty years earlier, too, as they went by, adulterated with death?
Or some shy, crumpled laughter carrying with it
the air of an unspoken but certain defeat?

Due to formatting, this poem is best displayed as a PDF.

Yes I helped decree it.
In the white-walled
room of before with
strangers + veils.
Don’t think I don’t think
about it daily. Up here
fumigating my oriel
according to the Newer
Ordering. I feel exactly
how we got here.

While we were waiting for the movie to begin,
my wife caught up with her old friend Maryann,
and because I could only make out every
third or fourth word, my attention fluttered off
in search of something else and landed on
the thirty-five-ish couple sitting three rows
in front of us—the backs of their heads

Weeks after her death I came to the garden window
to marvel at sudden pale feathers catching, scattering
past the rainy glass. I looked for magic everywhere.
Signs from the afterlife that I was, indeed, distinct.

Far into fever, attached by cords to the soft-
clicking machines, he sleeps
in a bed in a room not his own.
People enter and pass like ghost-blown
fogs. He is a slow walk
with limbs that recently gave way.
He is part of the blue snowfall.

It’s a strange place
                 to try & find
God—inside

I am learning how to sleep
                  again, to love
the descent, or is it,

lying here, a rising up
                  to summit
where sleep wanders

after an oil painting by Peter Doig

As is always the case with Doig, we are on the inside.
Outside, this time, is a coast we all know.
The view is ideal: the day has reached an end,
the water is mostly still, and the moisture in the air
makes every light into a star.

PUGIN
I was reading a biography of Pugin. Architecture
was how Pugin avoided God.
This much is evident. When he slipped out at night
to drift down to the water he was a smoke.
He did not look up at the moon. We can be sure
that any bargain he made was intentional
especially those he bound in straps made of snow.