zafusy

As night
earthbound
birthed by a stone
which it floats
sails your love
lifting
swift with its stars
day’s disappearance.

As shore
I drift from
hurrying impossibly
pounding and pounding
bloom your rescues
flames in twigs
anxious to hold
the invisibly living.

As one
gone out
each morning toward someone
who won’t return
enter your leaves
their green
their heart-breaking green
again.

Peter Rennick

Is there anything slicker
guardian of ripe raspberries
in physics or in heaven, this
come to a prick after these
but what explains leaves
healthier by a smelly stream
so many jagged modulations,
nearer the ground, nearer
the blossom, or stranded in
it matters, does it, if you’re
between it tastes like one
who knows its knowledge
isn’t, is it? Itch the bitch.

Peter Rennick

Though I go every
day to pick up the fallen
eaten eyes
of the world fondled
pomegranates always
there’s more to stoop and
suffer and some
few whose blood come
still shelters glitters
in my licked
fingers a face at
the next table or garnet
gaze there in the street
the skin torn flame
where it lifted from me
the throat groan
and the sunlit stumble be
merciless
culls for me.

Peter Rennick

I would have that in me too that calm you
took and said you’d hold it for me maybe

great swells great plains of which no one
has seen past not these the least of you

past cliffs the heart bellows out bluff
silvery thoughts take off their waves

and only you to speak to I go down my
low skiff shifts round preconscious water

your voice improvising the silence louder
without the intercession of a sparrow’s moan

without the weaning of an afternoon forlorn
I tongue through shoreless lights I edge

and keel-haul close myself over all your wrecks
who no one ever sinks to now or loves

Peter Rennick

At the end of our imaginary relationship
I met you finally in that physical world
which to be visited is so much smaller
than remembered like logic to intelligence
an empty body in a beautiful brain but just
your opposite tolerably unpleasant not
sad but sadder than hardened come
because we’d skated long too long and
sweat had mapped your back snow white
with blood the star wheels had ripped
along my arms fractures where you were
wont to lay my words in rows hoed
like brazen upstarts out of your skin
where all my screams of green had run.

Peter Rennick

I laugh the way you’re caught there it looks bad
(but will new longing or old damage synchronize

spring rains?) in some impoverished Pollock, restored
by nature on a bench mid-blizzard, sipping scotch.

Turning it over, I still feel your ghost body forking
into me from some old grave. Turning it back,

we’re stones wedged furiously in a dry creek sky.
Wasn’t that the year they recalibrated beauty

in favor of rejection? But your tears weren’t even
born yet, wearing away this flowery space between

irreparable and closure. Always to be a flood
when you grew up, and have me for your dam alone.

Peter Rennick

When to the world a marriage is coming on
go back to smoking
fucking on that desk above the lake

two windows icing over
the moon’s lost face
padding thickly about the room
there was only one

pale tremolo of sails on bottled waves of blue
back then
slapping consciousness
all night

where on our backs
it made its shore
a surety in us.

Peter Rennick