From the Fishouse

Let me be the architect
in the glass city of your mouth.
The wild clock of your mouth
spins backwards: glass to sand,
sand to freshwater pearl.
Let me be the beekeeper, feather
merchant, knife-thrower, soothsayer,
the savant of your mouth.
The farrier with tested theories
of wear and distance,
the shoeing of your mouth,
the alchemy of it, its horse-drawn wheel.
Let me hoist half a sugared lemon
to the slick roof.

Because the mouth moves us
from one unknowing to the next,
let me banish the charted course,
theory, and fine angles;
let no mechanical lily
take root in its soil;
let nothing be raised
to its palate—no pale words,
no anvil’s lust for iron, nor the hands of men.
Let nothing obscure the mystery
of the thumb-deep vault
of the thimbleberry of your open mouth
as you sleep under the dawn-flicker
of tea lights.

Let there be room enough
for the Weaver Maiden and Ox Driver
who lie shackled to polar banks
of the River of Heaven, where once a year
they cross those star-laced waters in your mouth
on a bridge of sparrows,
meet midway and lose themselves
wholly in each other like branches of wisteria.
Give me this star-tortured patience,
the yearning, this one night lived
and relived in the heavenly bodies
moving over the wings of your mouth.
One thimbleful of wet light
poured into another.