This That We Have

call the year anything / call it twenty-twenty-something
the maps can tell us nothing everything something
of this electric world where doors open
the expanse of memory freeing itself
into the diaphragm of oceans, soils we find bearable

like life or maybe language a liquid thing
we lock our heads around & hearts what to do with these
flesh-chambered engines we widen widen like the sea
like
a morning no more invisible than a black shoe
on a Black foot than two black hands laced
before a windowed, night-hued city
bright cluster
of fingernails enclosing the day
we come to these cracked spaces tuned—

to the lifetimes of extinctions swimming
in our mouths white-noised as
the future—a figure of speech

* * *

we are past hidden our lives, ourselves hinged
to winged things
like shadows at midday ruined cities crowding
at our feet
to watch what is rehearsed the waywardness of crowds

to meet again in the convoy on our way to anything
blue and scorching just as to arrive

un-fleshed
we who sound the Atlantic’s long rage
call the year anything; call it 1492
every sunset, an emergency
in this world
captives

bellying their sense of the dark

as day splits open
a danger
though we bow to everyone who brings a drum

* * *

a fiddle for the frenzied ringing in our bones
we practice saving
ourselves from the quadrupling intoxication
sudden, inconsolable as anything the elephant’s
stolen tusk

the frozen plane below must crack like cymbals
in this knowledge but who can hear
what we do not the fevered incantations of the dew
way up here
the chorus tonight [we know by now]
is the gurgling of seahorses
& the starfish giving up their placentas
to the wideness of the sea
just as the barking dog a country away
enters its cracked femur into the logmarked for saving
this world

more intimate now to us
is the flammable language of maps
the silence we admire in the birth of things
the effusive doctrine of birds

above us, such incandescence we move
with the desiccated graces and stones and roses
the lines we inherit
the error of floating houses

* * *

do we petition the summoners of our preventable catastrophes—
whoever claims to cleanse the village
without picking sides
is not believed
until the tongue pulls us together
in the middle of repetitions
the shared sutures dissolving in our eye

amid our flight, our voices splotch the distance
our resplendent songs blackening

like a hurricane refusing a boat to wreck
the wounded map we dance upon
we danced it here

to the plantations at the sea’s beginning bend
tell everyone the matter
is not the self which we have always had
nor the caves
that in their damp and dark, know themselves
but the maps we’d move the world to make

* * *

like healers—

& crickets, disorient the cartographer’s loftiness
down to bush and flock to sunsets that hide
the lengths and breadths
we come back to; papered

with no even sense of the invisible
even empty as clay pots
we want the repaired century

nested, stained and carried in our heads
then loosed to the tall grasses
where frenetic servants’ visions

are ledgers of our semblances a clearing
the timbre for our reunions

look, call the year anything we should bring
bring a place to point to when we arrive