Bearing

Awakened in a crack, high in stone, blackened
soil for sheet or sheet for soil. It doesn’t matter.
Either way I was unhanded, defaced
with richness. Neither minutes nor hours
put me there, just height, and the inability to land.
Below simply unwilling to lend my body flight.
Was it your realm or not that loomed then,
woven out of unseen clouds—unseeing—destroyed?
Too mine, too, the icht in night knocked and left.
My feet kingly to a humbled head. So unlike,
I snapped sleep in two, its cane, unstrung
its leash. You bled some as we made out way
out among the lilies, no more wondering. Me uh. Me a…
Storm kissed glass of skin, yours or mine,
the out-wet in. You slipped into rising ice
midsection of me. The mistook pull now love for fright.
There was no weight like sound. No measurement
meaning last tick, first click this clutch
at breath and now begun. Unwilled and willing
in another body’s protracted kingdom, ocean of undersun:
Percuss it. Percuss. Midnight frayed. Light
gone grainy into loops of unkempt tissue, violet
at the edges, making for violent figures,
the endless sight behind shut eyes. Always
and again the cells require it.

“Bearing” is from Live Feed (Alice James Books, 2001).