from

When I Was a Poet

For Phillip and for Marwa

Featuring Robert Frost, William Cullen Bryant, and Alice Notley

Now darkness was not upon but was

the deep’s complete face

and then was roof on the valley that

that which is not valley knocks.

In darkness, mine was not a linear condition.

Mine was the express mission of uncountable spirits

reaching in ceaselessly to relink their fingers.

I was architected like a multidimensional radial hemorrhage.

I dilated on all axes like a dahlia

and was a field of this.

And then fell the fallacy that the dirt

I worked and from which I ate

and into which I was delivered

to be devoured could not possibly

vibrate the notes of my brute living;

so spoke the beast out of the void

in its god costume. In its compass

there was hematite. In my ears