From the Fishouse

Knowing your shoreline
its auburn thirst

creatures inside sing
one has black hair

our legs are gnarled
behind the mirror

raging with a mountain of birds
the song plays

but now the bloodhound
of your heart starves

and wants to get married
and buy appliances

as the world unto our home
spreads our grease our pudding

to red hills where loss is

•

There are few scars
a slight tremor

a Chinese girl taken out to the forest
who thought she saw God in the exhaust

it is the full gallop of foam
fallen like a cake

but it is her—half eaten
as a man peels off green gloves

meanwhile a woman opens
zinnias with full pods sucking

the springhead of muscles

•

Your heat is a shape of a fish—
pulpy and ecclesiastical

faint hairs on the shape
like a chain the color of soap

I watched you
take off your shirt

as the lamp grew on the walls
do you think about holding

it and your hands gasp for air
they are precise witnesses

there is a seed in you
olive of light

sucking the edges
in the throes of your magenta

I woke from a long thing
sleeping smell

and you thin as a bean
said my nipples

saucers spilling dark—