You know there is something missing but you don’t
know what the missing is.
The neighbors are pissed at the neighbors
who are reconstructing the side yard while the neighbors are
replacing their windows
but still the neighbors are pissed at the neighbors because
of the sound of things hammering like he drops the ladder and
it
clanks against the steps his stepping.
Star tattoos and circles
too up her arms and legs like birthmarks.
She is obsessed with
the birding too or that is the problem in identifying just
one witness.
She said he helped her pull the weeds from the garden and laid
a cover crop of alfalfa and clover and comfrey over the beds
that lined the yard and this might seem like big and in the country
when small and in the city but she wanted to grow food there
instead of ornamentals or grasses and ferns.
The women are too
many to count them.
My mother.
And then your mother.
And to watch the years grow like thread
lines around the eyes and forehead and at the edges of the
mouth stitches sewn
having or indicating a life often pushing shoulders and
kneecaps uphill
against things the body wanted to be slicing into or
this was also a good use of time.
Endocrine system or digestive
system and how that is different from the ache.
She said the pushing at the thing with shoulders and kneecaps
is about that pushing of things and by that I mean struggle.
She
said to write about the war and I wondered which one of them
to include in the warring where to start and where to end or
just to focus on the present but seems false when so much has
preceded these moments and important although difficult to
comprehend and then which parts are omitted or like language
full of editing.
Oak and maple hickory birch willow and pine he
said the rain would be different if her legs were draped over
my lap and the
two of us reading but I am walking through it on my way to return
a movie and so that raining is wet but something different than
his rain.
The bodies moved against the smooth green sheets and
it wasn’t
the bodies that were finally moving.
Pesticides dropped from airplanes onto monoculture crops or
wheat corn maybe soy or corn.
Birds falling birds with feathers
and wings and beaks maybe conical or pink.
Blackbirds buntings
cardinals finches flycatchers grosbeaks hummingbirds jays larks
magpies meadowlarks mockingbirds nuthatches
orioles
sparrows starlings swallows tanagers thrushes titmice warblers
woodpeckers wrens.
Metal birds slice come pesticides and
that was or had to be or is still very alarming.
To move like
you do.
But real time and with limbs reach for limbs and mouths
for gaping hole or orifice or sex organ or cunt cock anus
hand tongue or
warm limbs reach through then press against you me
we.
A heat.
A flush.
A hungering.
When forced through recorded messages that can be deleted and
kept in boxes like handmade boxes but not made of handmade construction.
His
ladder against the front steps and just across the city not
the neighbor and the beds covered up for a wintering of alfalfa
or comfrey or clover.
Raining.
Emails like lifelines and lineage and she said birdsong but
over the television we could not hear her.
He said in those moments
following crisis even the media was unresponsive or not prepared
to say or never mind Oakland or
even Brooklyn we are talking finance so maybe San Francisco
or downtown Manhattan or some smaller finance city maybe in the
space that rambles out between.
So words like star tattoos filled
up our domestic or the inner and outer distance.
This ache of lung from here to there from here to hours
east but somewhere like a songbird out in the outer distance.
Leaning
into the sink that looks past the porch that looks past
the yard and past the row of evergreens planted before they
knew he would be years full of a poison and so years full
of somebody
actually dying a drawn chilled death and sometimes death is
slow.
As if not happening at the edge of the window and then
in the outer distance.
Beyond the fields full of tall grass
blown about small rodents furrowing and in the outer distance.
The freeway now over you
me we or that pleases us just to hush and witness.
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