George Kalamaras & Eric Baus

Births Incurred/your recently collected saliva*

 

dear birds,

I enjoyed your fourth poem, "dear birds." It includes many good images of "birds" that are indeed dear, if not deer-like. Wallace Stevens never knew the edge of four of three circles, curling inward like a strand of lost wheat. Cedar limbs sat in the only moving eye, and I especially enjoyed your use of metaphor blackening for the word for. My main suggestion is to show more that spell, to go further into the fade of the wing in your own vest, to find a nest that craves and does not crave chaos. Am I making sense? I looked out the window tonight and wondered whether a bird in the tree? Whether a worth in a bowl of cheerios continues the hand? Each oat grain composed of starlight not yet round, yet fingered together as fallen feather or heat. An exploding scar grips off dark sparks.

I understand that Vallejo has injured her voice. I comprehend that her throat is busy birthing an egg. I know, now, why the lump in my throat is always present, even in calm. Why my moral still has qualms. Why the quagmire. Why my nonplussed. Why, even, the hamstrung. Why the bird on fire in her chest. Still, I wanted to know more about the cliché, to see if you could snow more than yell? To see if you might explore the beginning of the closing seed followed down the fierce flake? The ink pen is crawling. The key chain must be turning. Or something like and not like that, for simile is always smokier than known. Might the final flight in your feather be made more chloritic? Might the scientific prance? Is there a sway to slow the adam's apple sound to a single peck of red? Does this make helpful in the sense of your revisiting flight?

 

*

 

dearest sutures,

sorry for my absence of lines, my breath has tightened over two hours becoming helical enough to infest the exact scent of your spine.

i am curious about your veiled inclusion, or spurious lack thereof, of iodine in the forms you filled out. yes, the salt you sent in your recently collected saliva includes this "necessary nutrient" but the extraction process is as long as the morning is phosphor. was this unsifted sodium sent as an oblique reference to unindexed history, an aside describing passive resistance to the blood always pooling in the sea's sink. are you saying the gesture in a harvest of ash can be applied to the fall of colloidal grains. have you drawn a circle in the sand with an x.

i am writing to you from the most public library in the world.

your papers have fully arrived.

the critique of geometry is endless.

i am metric to your wounds.

earlier, when i quoted my regional correspondent calling sunshine "a syntactically inferior form of transportation," i was referring to the way your light splits my tongue in four directions, delaying the, causing an a in my of. yes, you can say i "use whatever is in the memorized room," but i can't help feeling we're trading our primary feathers for illustrations of a paperback island.

it is official. i have been your sister since january 15th, 1995.

the pulp in your podium has fully arrived the remains in of.

 

*

 

dear burrs,

I was wondering if I might. Then again, it could be just. You see, I have this ectoplasmic stitch and am sure of sound, similar, say, to the way a crow might count the dread. But I am thoroughly convinced by the ground of my saliva that the oil of Hudson doves instigates. The way a river might come upon the most lithic of lulls.

The geometry of my fourteenth rib.

Exactly.

Even sometimes awfully.

Chlorenchyma.

You see, I was spelling your name backwards tonight, when the crown suddenly came to me, cire, and I wasn't sure whether to make the noise with my mouth or simply vowel away to sound. You apologize for the absence, for a halo of thorns, a nest of rose whips, but her braid has tightened in my pants, and now I know wind might not ever be solid. Soiled as glass caves we had once entered when we walked our wings westward into the herds that lie there, a thousand stars exiled as scars. I am glad of my papers. I am certain that their arrival means the endless. And my critique continues the way spit falls into a very deep lake. The public library is full of thieves who will not pay for how the earth reads their bodies back each day as indented in snow.

And now my pedagogical.

The circumference of my salt.

Certainly.

The pulp in my stomach even before the morning news.

And so I apologize profusely for the burrs I sent in my teacherly. I confess--I couldn't sleep. Even after two cups of boiled milk gave my mustache a second skin. Tell me, can an auburn braid somehow curl above someone else's upper lip? Even across town? Even if his salt refuses the stratospheric lull of the sheets? I am at a. I am thoroughly convinced I couldn't, even if I. I'm not sure, even, whether my try at "I" is spilling off parts of itself as seed into the "i" you insist. Can you help? I would, of course, send you a burning owl, removing it from the chest of the woman you had inverted. Which might, anyway, be altruistic as wheat.

 

*

 

dearest stir,

there appears to be diagnostic friction in your amblyopia, your patched off flight.

the corrected version begins: "if a seed powders to husk in the bowel of..." not "the x-rays came back blank, the coral hull is groaning..."

spell cyrillic pleas. follow the pointer with all your moths closed.

crack this grounded star like so: as a symbol of my capitalized wing [better one?] as a dented speech of teeth [better two?].

your vowels have been spreading since i notarized the "ancient am" under your arm, and your tilted diction suggests a torch of arid bladder syndrome. the crunching in of hosts.

Jean-Michel Basquiat's "Anybody Speaking Words" (1982, acrylic and oil paintstick on canvas, 96 by 61.5 inches) is perhaps the best glottal stop for your repealed gloss, your nitrogen highness. as i'm sure this piece clearly demonstrates, the centrifugal swerve in your third opera is almost entirely crossed, an impossibly intoned operation.

i assuage you, this aphasia will swoon.

 

*

 

dear births incurred,

Sometimes I feel a strain just below my. I can't believe it might, or even should, for that matter. I can't pull my tongue apart from the south. Even the penguins sleep with their heads polar north and cull the bees back into their beaks. Or so they suggest with the last of the evening flight sinking fast into their chests.

Torn doves, I hear from the rafters, but when I look all I see is sound. Yes, see. The way a Hindu holy man enters the chew of. Dakshineswar. Kalighat. Dusk. Syllabic spread of musk the way a salve settles. Sun-cells in the Ganges, calling scraps of carp out from beneath shad scum. Your notary has arrived with the grounded star, but she rubbed it in my forehead like a fleck of broken glass. Now whenever I close my eyes and peer inward, five limbs of a cedar appear, then become an elephant's four legs and trunk. I do keep the pointer, as you suggest, but given its phallic curve, I sleep with it under my pillow, a clove of garlic pressed there to coax a son from the sulferous tilt of moon. If the x ray returned blank it is only because when seen from the outside I am truly not a cedar limb. Nor am I a graphite scratch across her cheek. No one knows that better than you. Your own green depth. The swage of your plan. Your dark blue thumb full of rooster blood and rotating in the smear of your arm. Or was it a dislocated collarbone disguised as collard greens, rigid from the snap of sun that keeps their rot from hammering out of tune?

Tonight, I went to the concert and heard Brahms' Piano Concerto #2. Yes, saw it spilling its salt backward through powder of the ground glass you gifted me with. Strange cut of sound I knew I could die inside, if I was truly alive. And then I wept, thinking of the owl so alone and on fire, so far from the school yard and that spilled lunch pail with the Hostess Twinkie converted to fasts. Maggots of the week long. Echoes of primordial dusk in the sip of. Even in the heaving forth of love mixed with aim. Iodine? Sure, but place it only in the left eye before closing the moths. See what it's like to see only orange through an orange eye. Dead opium green of wings left for velvet. Spread origami scene of stings wed nor pelvic. If a symbol symbolizes something symphonic, why not start with the letter B, toned to swan flat, in sunset spools through a peaceful lake in A minor? Truly, even Andre Breton would be forced to capitalize segments of his salt, spilling out as sparrow secretions onto the sheets. Crown of my heart, I am busy correcting everything I have ever bitten. Which includes the rotten green pepper on the counter, bruised with the slashing of lime yet clear as a stutter of doves in their momentary sift of light. Graphite. Sink. Just above my. To the left of the rising. Coagulating scar in the forehead of. No friction. No dialysis. No patch except the parang of sacred sound we're wedded to from the torment the birth bag bursts to moment the several years we aren't.

I fear the pointer will work too well, and I want to return it before I birth another smog separate from my moth. My collection is large. I keep it in a large box. I want to keep collecting and make it even larger. But I am slow in confiscating the seed.

Send me the secret powders. Date them 1982, even if their hosts died in 1933. I will feed the owl bits of watery light as I await your reply.

*

 

dearest sire,

i am doubled in the sultry strands your recent medicine airs. thinking my ears solid of dialogic fictives. how the vernacular of your counterspell wrote me, silently, as "hospitalized king" or "carnivorous comet." like the speakers you disguised as a single loyal subject were plucked, suddenly, sodden with hidden hymn.

if the kind rise for the nearest miss, my quietest sister has recently paired with a musical score (John Cage, In Three Movements, 1952, 4'33") under the polynyms "figures for a darkroom voice" and "nascent strain: factors in a desiccated rhythm." isn't that similar to the hived horde welding in your significant digits: a filling empty of its shiv, the most silent cast of crib. i thought so while she sang salve bee flew black powder (in place of your static) as an extra frame on is. the way glucose binds through an escalated throng. or tongue hones in the shapely of thirds.

i have catalogued your recollections presciently. listed the spots where the thinnest skin breaks. dressed in dissolve. by the light of my fallen gauze.

if my early repose evens this culling, calls your split sign "sliver power" or "low night in the house of shattered f-stops," would you shut my left eye off to dust me. etch me into another blocked lens.

i remember you will ask for wool and gills, not bread or ballast spread evenly. isn't that as similar as like. if forward is the glacial front. a slower peak and creeping.

forgive my unabridged diaspora. i am running through every screen.

 

*

 

dear bauxite blur,

And now my Montana. Which is nothing like my skill, though it resembles the Eel River here in northern Indiana on any given September.

All day while driving through the fields, I thought of your paladium--one of only two such mines in the world. Big Timber and Russia. Or is it platinum? In any other language, that fork tine near Yellowstone might mean Little Turtle's unresolved defeat near Fort Wayne, Indiana. But today it meant here, not how.

Okay, I agree. There is a disenfranchisement of stamps in my taxable. Which may or may not account for introducing a Eurocentric decree into the immune system of a mineral-deficient tree.

Kenapocomoco, they say. And I saw its muddy scale. Tell me, does it mean Serpentine? Snake? Eel? The Snake Fish?

It is difficult to quell when one's part of the racist homonym, even against his best intent, just by virtue of floods.

Dysentery as a way out of one's own infectious waste?

Oak. Sumac. Ash. Red maple burning up the sky down here on the down-trodden branch.

Peter Ogan. Richard Helvey. Does the thread of red in the long coat mean beaver trade? Their twinning suggest 1836? Cottonmouth? Does the scattered branch approximate, Joseph Harter's daughter, Phoebe, the first white child born in the territory?

I don't believe anymore in 13,000 square miles. Even in the world's deepest lake. Even that it's somewhere in southern Siberia and begins, from secret springs, with the letter B.

They came at midnight, tapped my chest one by one with Brahms' lost baton, whispered Eurasia. Christened me Baikal.

I prefer to call it bauxite. Because I am in love with your vowel, its rinse mineral mouth, and the mince it fights with the way it's boxed by sound.

And now my September. My northern. My any given. Even my resistance to calling it Indian unction.

Gorgeous fall air falling forth extreme summer heat? Quell me. Swell my. Question my palm. Line of fate where three rivers meet. My dearest bauxite blur, is a snake an eel? A water moccasin, a Phoebe in the transfusion of mud? Is the film in the mouth cotton or milk? Is brown fall rain the damp crack of a hand?

There are more problems of translation than we know how to eat.

 

*

 

dear drained oracle,

dot dot dot. i'm building a body out of paper, splay, and splice.

you write an i after negation to displace my scattered breath, to shake off every landscape, but what does it mean to correspond through glass, to continue a critique of accumulated angles.

rendering clutter, you say our dialogue is "buzzed with the" or "a twin of approximate glint." but i'm concerned about curl, the arc of letters in elongate and distend. undertone or puncture.

your letters turn to means in the thinking dust.

remember in the house between cinder and flare, where your worn parchment was a split open rain. the straightest cut of stars. my tongue wrapped in sparks. you could say i bend the law of threes to cross-section that count.

you could shape my mouth to believe in the body, descent, and sugar, but why replace my tongue with test flint, why cast an understudy to pronounce our gravel stone.

 

*

 

dear hour of my birth,

I had no intention of casting an understudy to articulate our home. You've misperceived, in part, my strain. But you are not the first among the empty wrist to hand me back a dismayed breath. It happened recently, in fact, with reference to a fish. Forgive me for not specifying, but I am still raw from that momentary sinking. Still, though, may I ask, cinder? In the mouth of an ant? That's partially correct, especially with regard to the twin of approximate buzzing. Let me put it this way:

      If x squared = a jar of celtic seasalt,

and y - bedsores = the praying mantis's still even scraping,

then how many ounces of thinking dust might displace your most intimate negation?

I imagine this law compensates for the lack of three's in my name? It is my sincere hope that it does, that I might one day arrive on your stoop, clasping a box of my own thinking dust. But it concerns me since something green has hobbled my favorite tongue. Still, I call it cinder, call it approximate mouth, call it saddest fin of a fish searching for a bone. I call it even nothing, because we are friends, and I know you will understand.

 

*

 

dear somnolent statue,

i'm afraid i animated the wrong vessel with my latent vellum skim. i was trying to taste tone in the grains of your breath. to siphon the gavel from my stomach. to leaven the bacteria sunk evenly among our feathers, laced with rain.

as you discovered by swinging a hen by both necks, three of everything is the law of our fathers, and birds are singular as a rule.

need i mention your constitutional deference to flight. the utterance of crushed chalk or wing pared to plenum.

to say nothing as foundation sleeps. to say and scatters lice.

i remember your advice: "never trust a robe with a mirror for a face. even if the epididymis spawns interstitial swells. even if the epidermis is lucent with rind. hide. membranous." but i'm moving in the snow skins, woven singly and pared to ashen.

everything is threaded saying three. a negative mouth proven solid by saying.

if light moves evenly through our skin, i agree completely with -est. the statute of is erupts thistles.

 

*

 

dear burrs incurred,

There is never any need to anthologize. Especially to me. For I have gathered together all of my own loose singings, and they have stung me with hung. You offer that the hen might be swung by both necks, and my solitude makes me decry. In fact, I find myself. And then I ask. And then wonder about the hen's third. Even its thirty-third. I find a room without many mirrors. And find myself offering the lamp one of my luck tongues. Which brings me to the question of lice. I offered to decipher for you, please recall, only sea lice, for they are part of the vowel to which I am impacted. Believe me, I am not partial to doves, even if I might say grunt in your sleep, backwards perhaps, until I lull it toward dissolve. I have kept a dead one. I have craved its arthritic. Creeled, even, its crease. I have crawled myself every name imaginable, tugging taxidermy from the dirt before all else.

Perhaps I should clarify?

That has been my precise for as long as I could cleave.

Even my mother.

And the grandmother and grandfather with whom I.

Not to mention the divorce.

Who both came to me in last night's saliva, crimped as owl resin, on the pillow case. Alive as, yes, you might expect, except for the hen each kept hidden in blood upon an apron. Grandfather, I asked, I never knew you too could wrap yourself so carefully in a napkin, could allow our mouths and leave out the cooking? You can imagine my nakedness when, without shirts, he offered me olives and bread, saying something about his island and how I, too, might surround myself with watercress.

So what I mean is that sea lice at least crave salt even as they. Which strikes me as perfectly. Even acceptable as perhaps the best possible. Even in the. To complete oneself by being sewn, arms spread, into someone else's chest at your elopement of birth? To utter crushed chalk and mean it, even in the midst of inscribing your shame in the bone of her face? Still bone, central born, from which sound solidifies. From which a hen neck. From which an island inherits what's offered in the foam of a whitecap? Snow skin, you suggest, as an eruption of thistle? Well, yes. Epigene. Epidote. Epigignesthai. But honestly, burrs incurred--what core for one might mask? The room without many mirrors retracts my name back into the single spinal nerve. And the old sting might be cave loss as sung. A luck of tongue epinastic in the firestick. In the still damp lamp. Lightning stretch of sound that pries loose the old ways of chalking, scrawling alert the thousand mouths, sting-beats I've amassed over years in the loose paces of my homology.

Let me say, again, thank you, profusely, for stirring my stung. Reswallowing the bee entrail is never easy. I am serious when I say I have been blessed with its very.

 

*

 

dear abbreviated flock,

thanks for grasping the pigeons i sutured to your lining. i was trying to pronounce our science quieter than skin. to be awash in surface. the stretching out of chords.

i am worried about your embedded bout of disavowal. the submerged magenta hidden under your blue. the arteries of am or spilled tongue of a.

everything i say is part sound rain. half flayed iris. a flutter or umbra in the house of wound beginning.

the contractions accrue.

please forgive the me in my incessant lips. the lisp in a still of my virulent i.

do i really need a title to talk myself transparent. can you see still my fingers through your cellophane dome, your most lucent ceiling. hinging each clear to glass, you are twice my projected image.

a singular moth emitting in factions.

the table to taste a measure of rewound breath.

you say we are extracted from the underscore. partially sounded grain. to express our collapsed service. to represent a divided hive. you say the chest is a place just to step from, but i have found a crushed the in my lungs. a cyst in the flight of my buried in.

become a pinhole, you called, turning to sparrows, but my detritus had already changed to dirt, all my alembics slowly went box. i am filtered from your chimera. a tincture in the progress of your aviary voice. trying to pollinate a stop and its edges.

 

*

 

dear breath turned,

It has been too long since your luna cough inhabited the lamps. I know because I poured the lake back into the lantern, creating the color red.

You speak of dialogue in at least seven voices.

And the moon has pieced your scrawl across the stones.

You wear it like a fright of birds, lifting--in succession--from the elm, a withdrawal of splintered dusk at dusk.

Now you approach me through my own voice as I read your letter aloud to the leaves.

A moth, adrift in my sleep, talks back to the wind.

I know you are busying yourself, gathering hives to ingest the second sound of three separate echoes.

Which is one reason I hum to myself, even when I am awake.

Have you ever heard the sound of the color green approaching ecstasy?

Have you read a bee entrail in the clay of a cup as your most moist mouth? Lantern shadow on the wall as the wall?

Write soon. Sometimes I think I am breaking apart. Retreating into the retraceable. One broken, once bird, at a time.

 

*

 

dear dissident moth,

we are moving in a framed sky. stranded in fluorescence.

our primary landscape is extinguished light.

when you called me cosmonaut-in-a-stray-rocket. sense jettisoned together. i was strewn in the aperture. the trajectory to trace a splintered out and. wound mouth so diffident i sprung or fluttered.

you say you feel protected by the way we both flicker.

the submerged magenta hidden under our blue.

your endemic vocals have bled through my medicine. said we begin threadbare and deaf, joined at the hip to dissonance.

i am the docent and cinema of everything that lisps.

listen when the static frays.

can you hear me through the undertones. the space between our walls.

you could say i'm grafting my lines on a patch of wrinkled scenery, but i'm already lost in the milligram shimmers.

skimmed from a distance. projector residue. a confluence of blurs.

 

*

 

dear brahms-blurred spur,

Yes, I too feel a framed moving. Almost as if I was. Or perhaps might be.

We are predictably lethargic, cast (as we are) at the expanse of our cry. And I understand your desire to lisp, even if the medicines are broken are a gift to the deaf.

But I urgently refuse to sift the scald, the haltered tongue. Even the wash of worms. Worse, I cannot fray the warm distance apart as if spoken hearts of me disperse as song-saw or seed. Please do not graft my pod onto your own tight lip, where zinc dispatches dozens enough, for I did not mean, to enlist an engraver enrapts one in enigma. I would never have inscribed such a mineral rinse. At least with regard to birds. Or even a conflation of herds. Or cruels or fish.

For his baton passed up through me. In the night. In the middle of. In urgent mid-stride. Past my dissonant. Into my dissident. Part. Moth. Where each fur-tap wing enstatited my left eye, enucleating the feather from his head.

Whether Hungarian Dances or the third movement of the Third Symphony.

Whether his A German Requieum or the second sag of his left beard.

Quick hair, dead hair. In the quonset mouth of sound I might if I could only. To bleed a blurring of spurs is to admit that the potions are wrong?

Partially.

But there's also the waiting flank, the voluptuous windmill turn of a tongued star.

Our primary place is to frame the frame with a shaming of fence. To lean against the most of our mouths and repeat three times, quite softly, how can cardamom and cardamum both spell the same monkfish to milk? I know because I keep your left eye posted in my pants, stroke it spice when the adagio seeps. When every May 7th. When the sonata's spoken water. When Hamburg and a seedy area by the docks. When Brahms, in cardigan, appears fully snowed, limbs completely stormed, and the moisture in his sweater thread breathes scales of crystalline depth well below the first button from the neck.

Can you hear my shy? My photographic squint? My survive my? My screen-every-damn-phone-call-even-if-I-don't-expect-a?

I don't know what I'd do without your five-pointed lisp. It turns every moth, every marred fish in my mouth, to silt.

 

*

 

dear albumen asp,

begin with my bitten. with the silent. with my out of air.

of course i fully echo your exoskeleton.

i have flayed the recording of your "little sound." your spectrally ambivalent chest. the active past. the actual, acute, undiagnosed spain.

the roe you sprung through your last letter has hatched into my shavings. stilled my silk open. frightened my folding into.

i understood when you said i feel absinthe in my grams. pills in my lips. but why the bleeding bottom card. why this palimpsest under my chest.

if i am prescient at the ends of my skin could i go fever inside. to stave the aspirin spilling through my skeins. my hand parted kiln.

to taste incendiary or rain tin. to score the rest of the sounded out house.

thanks to your recent endocrine strands the swelling has been startled. do you think i should continue bleeding a partial.

even as i say it this is only splits. an a torn in thirds. have i blotted the ventilated tuft slipped under your snow. my own snow which i have moved into continually.

because my percentage is so porous. i have reversed to eating the rice from my name.

so many people have said. so many possessives in my pound-infested ears.

i listen for you closely in my second sister, my barbed but accomplished splice. i feel for your dispatched dances. or even a hair.

 

*

 

dear sorely splendid burr,

Let me satiate, clearly, here at the ousted, without growing any fervor, that my exoskeleton is that of a pony, a dog, a leech. Not a fort inoculating me from the blubber of touch or tongue or sinkhole sweat.

That is one season I've hatched over and over as winter from July coffee. As autumnal blood in my mint. My southern sunset-most sea.

How can you echo the depth of a tapeworm I have held since 1910 from the intestine of a Husky called Samsun? From rifle-ring burr-freeze in his fur? Glosts of snail blood? My Antarctic? My Amundsen and Scott? My Shackleton? My mournful Manchurian ponies transposed 8,000 miles from Siberia to New Zealand? Even further south to collocated inane?

I do not mean to overstate my joints. My softest. My muscular mouth. Even the fervid Indiana phlox. For I completely concoct your brotherly care. Its wraithful vest. And appreciate, most eerily, your loving sponge upon my cage. But an exoskeleton equaling one of my longest? My most gray? My shoulder-length splint? My somehow-snowing-from-my-sledge?

You crawl me asp and I peel each belly pod apart to reveal snow pack as grasp. As parasitic. Absent. As hoof-scratch for grass. In their colonized. Their quarantine. In their shaggy and slither and hindquarter and limp. How Harbin, Siberia. How hobble and withers. How my can barely sleigh. How up the River Amur to Khabarousk. Two expeditions and all twenty-nine. How the final eight. Each fourteen hands high.

Yes, of course, absinthe swelling my blotted thirst. Possessive in yesterdays [sic] partial. But a barbed hut under the tongue is precisely my bone.

I thought you knew.

No spur should ever progress a shudder.

For I have sieved Fort Collins, Colorado, and now Fort Wayne. Indiana. Cross-latch of the cross-hatch.

Forgive me for crouching with the penguins over and over on this piece of lice my sliver my parasitic and lisp of thirteen men, eight ponies, twenty-six dogs. My numeric flirtation to stave the subtracting stung, a stake of walrus blood.

But it stains me to see a word pounded out as salted ears. Even shot blizzardy-dead one morning, belly-deep, out of some sting called compassion.

And so, my sore. My dearly splendid. My beloved burr and saddle-swell snow. Call me Quan. Call me Nobby. Call me Bones. Socks. Even poor Jimmy Pigg.

Induce me the inscription of their tongue in the rug and picketed. In their leg putty. Shag of my own grooming.

I thought you knew. That you had soaked the blanket spheres in epsom salts? But I awoke in wool to find an eight folded over to zero. That double blur of shocked-blood sleep.

North pole. South pole. Hammered-out breath. Smoke of the twice-forced. Beloved spine of the entire Indus, of the lotus-seated connecting birth-star to cosmonaut, a conglutination of past-polar and future-perfect into a magnetized now. Endless northern snow convected to manes and pulleys plodding south.

So, call me Snippets. Call me Snatcher, Jehu.

I have seen Norwegians and British race braids in my pre-War spleen. The stakes, the thigh. And whoever plants a flag it will always be 1912 and sinking. And a heaving of hocks in a two-foot drift. And a belly-burn spur from the fortified cinch. Cross-hatch of the cross-latch. To the all shot dead. To the fourteen hands high. Struggle-hold snow clear up past the belly to a mournfully broad, most noble, Manchurian chest.

 

*

 

dear elapsed hands,

i still and feed on your wringing, but can you now, my longest, my folded over evolve.

i lived to coldly acute music, quenched too profuse to leaven or rumble. this femur that walks skis through disfigured ground.

can you smear my moving spill. my alliterated i.

this landscape has overspelled me. i am scent and sores.

all i have cleft is my raining. it is my raining that causes these chronic letters. and so i wheat but refuse to boom. i splash a last entourage into the freezing.

i have no ambush. no hunger to disturb.

fort zealand was an even cipher. nothing but birth-connected slats. may i replete against to you. only a dismayed spain is pacific to my rigid cast.

if, as you cleanly spread, we slot like the ices we are, what of the abscess. the flickering umbra convexed in my sleet.

you say you felt residual in the wind we both burred.

it is your flight that perfumes me. form eating everything.

though i slake to body your manifest. though i stomach the quietest gauge. i had to cleave so many of my fronds in the code. at crossed sites.

and what of lost empiricals. the i understood as too. the bathed in permanent cloth.

i have no camouflage. no order to upset

i can no longer carry on in your shoulders. and so i sink. i sink and we are tarped under the same venn.

i can no longer let you mirage my hearing. consider this passage circled.

i have only a removal, this flight, and my fallen gauze.

 

*Births Incurred/your recently collected saliva first published in the prose poetry magazine, untitled, volume 3, edited by Leonard Brink. To order go to: spdbooks.org.

Eric Baus is the author of two chapbooks, the space between magnets (diaeresis, 2001) and a swarm in the aperture (margin to margin, 2002). His first book, The To Sound, was selected by Forrest Gander for the 2002 Verse Prize and will be published in 2003.

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