Year One

Begin goopy, immense,

a sky bunched with cloud,

a shakuhachi-pitched wind ruffling



the sparse assemblage of leaves.

Begin devotion, necrotizing and unkempt,

azoic and thready like something dredged from the sea.



Begin with the story—the late walk,

the house in the wood, the homicidally-red roses

blooming at the gate. Begin with the wind,



tugging the pellucid waves.

The first wish: to move like water over rock.

The second wish: to grow in all things increasingly solid.



Begin with rain, a late hour, the moon’s punched-out face,

mark left by a glass, the eyes stuttering closed,

a thing wholly of its own vanishing.



Somewhere, far off,

other worlds were happening…