The Disaster Year
Our nighttime is a slope of calm down which a burden tumbles. Our children under steel and buildings, splintered hunks of lumber lowering. Overmuscled men could never lift and shoulder them and leave. Broken clouds sink buried under city calm. Our fingers pushing into earth that grows into a valley, cedarhemmed and empty.
Our nighttime is a slope of calm down which a burden tumbles slow into some hole. Windowframed, I'm lonely. Lying on tile, my eyes become the kitchens I've known. I lie here and ask for telephones to ring. My eyes become a frozen river and a sled. My eyes become a staircase. My eyes become an icepick and a child who wants to sleep.
Our nighttime is a slope of calm down which a burden tumbles slow into some hole and through a door of earth. I lie here older still and still a river slowflowing itself into a lake. My cheeks are baby stars blown big by gas explosions. At the edges, ruins of a shed and rooftops burning. I hide my body in the lake, cheeks filling. Tiny bodies burdened under carpet. Shards of schools becoming turquoise crofts in the sky.
Our nighttime is a slope of calm down which a burden tumbles slow into some hole and through a door of earth and riverwet becomes a tree. Windowframed I am sleeping, from the lung of outside, older still through darkness. So old now my feet are newborn cubs. In daytime we're the birthmark of a cloud upon the earth.
Our nighttime is a slope of calm down which a burden tumbles slow into some hole and through a door of earth and riverwet becomes a tree of arms as glass fruits fall. Here between the centre and the edge belong our children, burdened by the sky, stealing fruit and black scabs blooming on their knees. Two children gentlesleeping in a garden of calm until a river's bursting out through noise.
Our nighttime is a slope of calm down which a burden tumbles slow into some hole and through a door of earth and riverwet becomes a tree of arms as glass fruits softly fall toward the pavement. And the darkness of my window is a river with fingerdug trenches in the waves. And tiny bodies buried while they slept.
Our nighttime is a slope of calm down which a burden tumbles slow into some hole and through a door of earth and riverwet becomes a tree of arms as glass fruits softly fall toward the pavement here beneath our feet, beneath the slope of night. Higher, beneath us, misted pineforest filled without our children buried and trees stuttering. We are up on this ledge and can see ourselves circling. Both of us now heavy with huge wrinkles hanging, swinging like censers, you with your eyes out, pointing down. When I stand and open a blanket now it is gone.
