As for that field, mud-rutted, a stammer
of leaves let go, its center
hollowed for skateboards to ride

cement ridge and spray-painted contour,
I remember how the best of them,
a red-head, could come out of hunch

and upswing to find the single lift
he’d trust: the well-timed leap, before
the board, back kicked, floated free

into his hand, cupped and waiting.
Life itself, for me, though I was half
drunk in those days, wasting whole

hours with all eight as they wheeled, circled
round, lined up, rolled down. After a few
drinks I thought I could see, full
speed, the greater gravity they got
on under curve, added weight they needed
to feel some baseline

of the body—small faith
that fell again and again that winter,
filling the white air between us.

•

Though not for the going only, I’d say, this girl
spun makeshift as Sargent made her
in El Jaleo: dance where she’s about

to drop-kick all the footlights, fling
her own shadow, ramshackle, up
the paint and oil of a barroom wall.

Also to get there, aimed off stage.
Edge of her left hand, raised, hell
bent on elsewhere. Until no one

cares how the air’s thickened
to visible, smoke and charcoals swilling the small
room round. Since it’s always her good

move they need—her now and
now—leading us past paint’s field
and tincture, past the lesser fidgets

of image. Top of her form. And we want
her all the more, onlookers, coming in closer
for her skirts caught in eddy, her color of

salt-blear-on-sea-rock,
that fulcrum. Everyone drunk. Everyone
on edge. See how the others, stage

right, claw inwardly up their own
arms, how the men down left strum
guitars all the harder. And if, outside

the frame, what little
light there is loosens like a syntax,
she’d push them all out there,

spin the flash and pivot of their wishes,
the living—each and every—
hauled fast into the black.

•

Tell me it all comes down
to your arm flung out, 3 a.m., its breaking
just across my belly, this proof absolute

I’m no one and nowhere else.
Happens that I’d like to touch
the waves your closed eyes ride in sleep,

your bit of dream beneath
the dumb show: lash, outer lid,
REM twitch. Awake, I’d make you see

how our room spins
its ink pools in ash, how these shadows
and passing headlights keep slipping

right into the endlessly under—
until river’s the word I’d whisper.
Then bed, the deeper beneath it.

And still you sleep like a child, like the one
in raw daylight we try lately to make from our bodies.
I can’t help wondering who said it’s so much better,

to be
alive, to add, from our openings, another
flesh?

Wall’s edge,
the dark-on-darks tunnel
down to some sunken ground

we’ll never see. God: I wish
you’d wake up. Listen—the early
risers slam their doors, off to work. Listen—

the pin-in-place, the one, somewhere
already itself, little shadow leaving
shadow to step on stage—can’t you hear

it?—the meanings getting heavier
with the green and give,
eyes closed, scrawled with our singular

mistakes, having to come down from
ghostling to fingers to first breath to us,
and we two growing into its first fat story.

Wake up, heart, it’s coming, losing
the tracks it took to get here, ready for a name,
palms opening, ready to hand it all over—