Across the World

I. Boy Leading a Horse

The light was thin, I saw—

Sun and ashen cloud

Descending, pouring at rough angles

Across the grey walls.

Boy, skin of the Earth,

Dreams of the ground, leading

Grey horse, fallen from the sky,

Birth of far bellows,

Smokey seas.

Eyes crossing

Far to my side,

Away from the rain,

Snaking rhythms and

Distorted pictures falling

Against the grey afternoon.

They said it had flooded

On 53rd, green sails braving

Brown waters between the curb

And midtown feet.

And everything the city held

So timidly, before the sky

Came pouring in blue stampedes

Across the city’s windows, secret rooms,

For lovers, ablution in rosy shades

That never met their eyes, entangled—

Your hands sought to lead to me

Grey clouds, dreaming seas,

But pass too soon, cascade

Against a darkening glass—

—and I watch the city pass in grey

Eyes who never meet, and me

Watching, reaching for the clouds,

With dampened, empty hands.

II. Foothills

By Route 36

you were an abstraction;

qualities of loneliness

swirling

inside the car.

Mouths would sculpt the air—

—remark how the flatirons

were not frozen,

but coagulated—

—blood of the serpent,

spiraling below ground,

echoing through eons,

pulsing in metronomes set

by the subtle pulse

of the Earth—

—and we, mayflies,

bred and born in a day,

dying with the evening,

setting the flickers of the Sun

as our years, though

they span

just seconds

on the clock.

By Boulder you

had condensed onto the windshield,

bleeding fog and drowning

in whitish-gray

the mountains ahead.

But if I had a mouth I could have noted

that your silence was kinder,

gentler than the heavy whirl

of the engine,

and the tires treading

the loose asphalt,

when we could not but pretend,

that neither of us

had anything

Worthwhile

to say—

—and by Estes I could remark,

to ears that weren’t yours,

that I had already forgotten

about you

even before we passed

the Colorado

state line.

III. Øresund

Before I saw the sky open,

The pinpoints of light fell

In watercolor gray,

Before the gleaming carnival of the sun

Emerged, hung from angles in the sky,

I traced elements of the sea, hints,

Irradiant and repose

Even through the foggy windows

Of the train.

We left Lufthavn

Last stop in Denmark,

Sky overcast, land whetted by the rain,

Approached the land’s end

In the east.

Iris, messenger goddess,

Duchess of the rainbow,

Watched, once, the sky

And cloud and sun and stars

Twist, against the threatening weight

Of the boundless north—

Cried, her tears iridium,

Silver and platinum, polished

On a mirrored plate,

Burned by the languid summer sun,

And the night-fires of barium

Enkindled along the horizon.

The daguerreotype set to dry,

Though silver rains still wash

With the steady fragments of light

In the west.

We reach the bridge, blue-gray like

Her mother, forged

In burnt silver

Cleansed by the sea.

The ships wait north of the bridge,

Watch them, from the train, hang

Almost, along the sparkles

Captured in the simmering waters

Below. The bridge sinks, and the train

Descends, and we watch,

Through smudged windows,

How the summer may still stand,

For a moment longer, younger than

The far point,

Of the sinking world,

And then sail into the irreversible grey

Of the north.