I do not want to go to the woods with you.
I do not want to be your “folk.”

If it comes to be a “just-folks” evening, if it comes to be I’ve come upon you,

empurpled in your coddling flowers—

immigrants hanging lifeless from the willows—

I will. Otherwise, suck this wilting leaf; I do not want to “waste” “wood” “spirits.”

The immigrants have egg in their beards.

I finger their noses, knuckle-deep in their nostrils.

I have come to enjoy your body, hanging lifeless from the willow.

I have come to tickle your feet with a stick.

If it comes alive by imposition, your body stronger than my body,
I will knock it back. The willow bends with your weight. I will break it.

If it comes to be you are the one to turn on, suckling hymnals from the compost—

the meadow come to cheer me on—then I will come and buy you out.

It all seems so certain, though
it is not exactly that.

Even you, with your neck snapped and your arms dangling at your hips,
are not exactly that.

A thorn blades such it’ll split your skin
jerking the stem, a single leaf.
Imprescriptible pincers leaving transparencies.

A wilted, yellow vein and then
another thorn. Your voice
lacquers the petals of your contemporaries

rent from pedicel, bullied to the wall.
When they come around, you fold in prim
and lift them. They will jerk in turn. The petals open, and close—

I want to make it with the wall.

I want to draw blood (would make
fine feeling). Swallows or sparrows at the fountain also

want to make it with the wall.

Lake M

Your child

                is lying

in a cut of the terrace behind you

He is she

        is he swaddled in peach skin,
juice in fleshy strings
from lip to lip, dissolving

small voice at once. Or, no—

            Don’t be afraid.

You split lonely without me, yes—

so I was sent—

        fair face of a glacial stone

Faces
        and your cheek

entrap

Speak without using the mouth, but

the lap, with its weight. I reach a shoulder and underneath,

tapering lances

an ear, expanded in echoes of mallow—

skin washed taut, a pale rose

held in the stomach.

       Into deafness I speak

with every turning breath— I am not as I need.

Crystals on each willow limb.

A region of quisling voices ravishing the shoreline with surveillant light.

A face turns a diluted eye—

      its iris cleansed of color, another eye diluted

turns upon me, lowering over.

Both arms slap the unstable mud. I squat, lifting the wrist,

parting my knees over the head between my feet,

staring into the containment of the sky, with wires.

A sudden, imprinting glare,

      I cannot hold—