For Dylan

Ice sheets rise

from the waves

of the frozen lake.

On loop, geese rake

the gray sky

in starlocked Vs.

You choose

now to come

to me

as I swell

with fracturing

waters.

What are you

doing: here

inside the home

you never came to,

mouthing your

whatever?

I madly

want you

to right it

but the lesson’s

to hear

what a man

tells you he is:

sand nailed

to the desert,

ship leaked

from a bottle,

bottle tossed

in the dry wash.

My choler

at having to skim

without you:

when you speak,

I want to force

your teeth out,

make little rockets

of blood

between us.

Birds leave

the fish frozen

and dead. You’re

holding me

and then

a first—

you ask,

but your please

splinters,

salts me

hollow.

I loved, I defiled

–St. Augustine

No small power, this: to find

the nail that has been hurting you,

the want to bid you back

from undone to our bed.

I keep country with a tarantula

poised in a hardened epoch,

amber gravity greater

than the horned heads

tracing the ravine beyond

this window. Gusts from their nostrils

are wools to comfortably die toward,

the thick locks against a fire.

There is no track back to how

just we stood, inhaling

the salt coast like those born

to inherit a name.

No small power, the noose of you,

art of my grossest fear. No surprise

that in the dream

where I bear you, we admit more

than ever: we have a hundred ornamental

children. A god sneers & the fall

breaks all their necks.