smudge

Movement flutters—

what predictability is not. Outside,

sunlight reigns ambiguous.

You can do that with your life.

Hope toward nothing

but continuance—flux

& reframe. Orbital,

the earth & moon. One

imagines a nucleus, tho

centers elude. For everything

an erotic surface. Today

i pick apple mint

along the roadside.

Despair rattles language

& later, after marking up

paper, after twisting stems

of calendula, i place

my feet in the pond. One day

smudges the next, each

renewed by darkness. Heart

beats break as doors open wide

unto elsewhere. A roundabout,

small town, heavy metropolis

choked in smoke, sky

orange, burning spruce,

lyric sullied,

a paucity of beds.

No future some can see.

Yet witness, in friendship,

the unruliness of

entanglement. Who pays

upon arrival, who child

of extraction, who’ll loosen,

let love hasten?

It’s beguiling—

truths obvious

the truth, incalculable.

i write to stay living,

read & walk for similar reasons,

yearn for uncontainables

—moonlight

beyond creek slope,

traffic & slow sex,

water softening wood.

The smudge outlasts us.

We tongue & teethe what’s holy

& cannot be spelt.