A Cento

You are the one I took you for

Dust enters dust in

I do not doubt your existence – any more that I can walk on the ocean floor (nonchalantly as a ghost)

With your longing, you are erased

You are not in the room or the story or the thought you are in the absence spoken as a charm again itself

You are a rough draft

To ask of oceans deep tendencies

Of it, fleck of star, lip of tulip, smallest cleft

To words you once recognized as your own

Of books filled with language that is never proper to the moment but serves as repository of the possible though the possible is not enough, as a tent is never enough in a storm

Darkness undresses the intermittent wind

With seasons with particulars with eventualities in your own accord

Calendars fill with lies. Who softens the day’s bright ledger?

You hold one in one hand, asking for clarity on a day

Nothing wears presence as violet destination steeped

You are told in small degrees, you,

Whose arms, hand, and fingerprint are etched on glass, plotless

and verbless without your trace

You are witnessed from the inside, your blood discoursing with itself over ethics and science

My pen is out of ink, and I am writing with a crayon I found inside the seat, turquoise I would say, but Indian blue its appellation, perhaps about the ocean

History is emblem: we are lost in light that cannot fray and doesn’t cost. No one to own

You are her voice under her own, her taste of certain minerals harsh to the ear of promise

Would you feminize hunger

or allow pronouns to lose

You speak of objects as needs,

as issues of having lost your swans,

here are your oars, your sea,

your cargo of blossoming exceptions

Globes present closure

Maybe limit or reservoir you are spilling into your own accord

You ask and it’s given

Of melodies whose notes contain the promise of an answer, as if music is an answer or patience a virtue or love an antidote

the birds your store of hours

Tied to life, you spill into water, deeper

Than any atmosphere, pastoral nature

Of windows, whose eyes are shut to the diversions of their intended gazers, birds passing on their short migrations over oceans filled with brine.

You know what to call it – you call it something else

She is strange here on the page of sky, cloud galleons sweeping

Overhead, small birds dotting the sentences, the world

Mistake’s knowing face set boundaries for your own – you come in love, leave in resemblance.

The body’s convictions

The moment took on its irreducible claim to being when he

He is grimacing or smiling at me

I am smiling back

So much worse for the wood that finds it is a violin.

I am not what you supposed but far different

Time and its’ “It was.”

Sound exists only as it is going out of existence

Pray heaven that the inside of my mind may not be exposed.

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