Light: the knife in the dark and the secrets it kept,
slatted half shadowed and learning how waiting
could mean something different depending always
on where you were standing. Light kicked back from
the moon and her territories, moonrise, moonset, all
coming together on the horizon like a word endlessly
sought and seldom found. Want to tell you just the
good parts, the parts that mean we're whole and solvent
from heart to harm. Want to tell you how it ends, how
we make it. How I stuck around after all. Want to tell
you I know honesty now, the shape and taste curling
under the tongue and how it's paradise; how it's poison
only because I'm allergic. I explain myself away,
desperate to disappear but it doesn't work; it never works
when you want it to. Isn't that right. Light in the dark,
even with the exits all shut and the electricity abandoned.
Ugly moon pale and falling into places she doesn't belong,
moon whose name abstains from written history but
settles the way some names do:
hands on the piano broken some years ago
hands around my throat, hands that were my own hands
hands controlled underneath by other versions of "I"
shadowing and shaking for reasons
I can never seem to remember.
But I remember you. The moon. And
the things you saw in it
until you couldn't see anymore.
Want to tell you I sleep over your deadness
looking for life. But maybe
you already know.

Please enclose your darlings, your
eyeteeth, your hands otherwise
occupied with a piano heart, even
your maps replete with dust just
waiting to take you somewhere old.
Give me ten ways to find you hidden
as leveled mountains, as trains
crashed and still burning, as the
lengthening shadow, as whispers
making waves on our shore, as one
night spent idle but painless, as
aspen woods in spring, as the curve
of a planet (not necessarily ours)
as moonlight making notes along your
profile, as cold air, as a mouth who
only knows words of forward motion.

Send your language too - broken off and
experimental, odes to those films you
devour: one continuous shot where
everything happens. No stops, no
chance to breathe or blink because
you might miss something. I want that
and more. But especially the language.
Broken off, I want your verbs set to
stun, your nouns engineered as only
last hopes can be, your adjectives
stitched on the insides of eyelids
everywhere
omniscient even when you sleep.