1. Tidal Range


The team fans out for the day, quartering in pairs, following the smells
or the groups of flies. Sometimes animals lead them.
Paw trails wend beneath overturned cars, tipped trains,
dried silted floors in buildings. At first, the counts were high.
Now, the number is more occasional.
The bodies, they count and gather. They tell officials.
In the face of something awesome
claim the value of it—

Often I board travelers out of sleep and they burden me.
But it is better than carrying
all that might want from wake into dream.

It’s possible to play so hard you break your toy;
to work so hard you eclipse your job,
to care so much you overflow all you care for and destroy it.
The grain of sand
claims me its conqueror and lover.

I have broken my game. In every face I see
a corpse, and in every corpse a life. This one
was trapped in its basement with a fútbol.
The death of the thing you love or the thing that loves,
this is what a heart or desire brings.
And the tally is in me overflowing.

I fill you up with love that I may find another
in the remains of you broken;
Or I spread myself thin
that I might find another love of you
from me in pieces rubbled.

I must admit a kind of joy
greets the torn city.
Lying there is a creature
who has done shifting in clattered, cracked,
and shambled, so many moments!

I am the structure that forces through itself the whirlwind
and explodes;
I am the oath that perjures itself swearing.
I am grass that grows upon the death of grass.
If you come to silence
you have come into my aftermath.

Left standing in the shell,
a grit, once layered, twice, with mud and sand.
Stay in this current and fail.
And when you cower, turn, recover your pieces
stride through them.

The counting soon will be done, but in the end, this is not the sum.

What was itself is not the sum. What clouds layer on the sunset
are not the sum. What colors ray out
into the suspended rain are not the sum. They embark in teams each day
to find a sum they will never reach.

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