There is a presence in the rafters waiting curled up in scaly blacks for the sun's last glance over the horizon, their shadows blind clones perfecting stillness, casting a dark insistence above me. The eternal longing flickers warmly in the blood. Wings thrum, unwrapping to the coolness. It is a miracle, this awareness of the night falling, an ache trilling over the riddle of their bones, a root-deep signal sinking in the skin. Standing in a sudden, pitch-dark whirlwind untouched but for the soft pulse of their staccato song reverberating off me, I return their questions as coordinates a strange satellite answering with the language of the night.

She snaps me unravelling wrinkles, pinning me in place with pegs her teeth clinch. Her hands, a tired thinness smooth over me while a breeze lifts the curl at her temple bringing far away flowers, old bouquets, their blooms petalled memories. he loves me, he loves me not When thunder begins to speak in low rolls her head lifts from her hands drowning in the sink to look at me out the window waving to her. I am the shirt, the husk of a working man who sleeps beside her, not knowing how the moon falling over her long legs could mean so much.

If the moon had not walked out of the clouds and I not into the clearing, we would not have met. But here we are: caught in the blue, frozen light our steps locked on the path. She has forgotten the eye of the coyote the haunting of the bullet crush of her hooves in lean winters and I, the sting of failures, loss of loved ones and the scars that live in the shadow we all carry. I have dropped chaos into the pools of her black eyes, will leave mad—a head full of snowy fields, naked trees scratching the insides of my heart but walk back into the forest with the taste of stillness on my tongue.

At the tarot reading the reversed hermit is pulled. He cannot see more than a few steps of his journey and must go by feel. My father is in the grease pit inspecting the belly of our '68 'Cuda. I have to tell myself he extends below the belt, below the sweating concrete where at his feet lie all the tools he needs. Light falling along his forearm pulls his face into view like a lured moth. He is like this in my dreams: subterranean, crawling out of the earth the caged bulb glowing in his hand, alone, trying to fix things, reassemble his marriage.

The Philtrum is an evolutionary remnant: The structure is an "accident of our origins" and a marker of how our face evolved from early jawed vertebrates—a remnant of a process found in our early fish ancestors. Milk of ocean, swell of tide, we are fish of amniotic seas. A wet incubation dreaming of the shoreline crawling over wet sand, grit sticking thickly under (fin)gernails. Random collisions of atoms fathoms deep repeat in sonar ripples of sound, a vestigial cry with the craving to return. The precision of submergence then the receding symmetrical rhythm depends on two halves fusing within the current of time. The miracle of your face surfacing sets me adrift as I sink a kiss upon the ridge above your lips tasting the ocean singing in the sweat lingering there.

all night we attempt to wind the dark evidence of this beach around the spools of our fingers but find the space dissolved and wide as a psychosis while the moon without effort pulls the water back to its home you say we could lose our hands to become the lack of insight the jealous balance of magnetic tide dragging our space about us as we make room for the dark yet my grip remains curled around the ropes of daylight lowering down its braids to whiten the sand

I want to make you a pie. The kind you would eat right out of the dish, fork tearing away chunks with no regard for slices. I'll bake it after the lover leaves you or when you are feeling sick. And in time, I will bring one after the funeral that will eventually come. The house will be quiet while outside the rain falls. You will lean your tired body outlined by the blue glow of the microwave's clock against the kitchen counter and keep eating, scooping it in, raw and bewildered by your hunger, unable to understand how something so simple could be so good and how quickly it is gone.

Silence of summer lynx asks you with eyes locked to hold his gaze, to hold breath. Fragments of light through forest's canopy rustle over fur of bronze and rust. Yet he is still. As if hewn from rock, carved from tree, I am something in the shadows rich in scent, tense-nerved and watched. He is an insistence, a suspension of belief. What is hidden in plain sight: Fear moving over tongue, pupils dilating. A heart beat and the stillness after. Faith and the waiting is holy, a moment in worship until he turns to merge into wood as the psalms of birds return.

In ancient Chinese Yu yi would mean “I remember” whereas in Mandarin, “jade suit”. Corpses of the Han dynasty royals were clothed in ceremonial garments made of jade. Come to a full stop and drift when a small mouth bass rips open a seam in the flat lake. Down inside, the tear holds water once cleanly cold with an awareness of its first time flowing. Later, this will not weigh what I expect it to. Upon reflecting there will only be a calmness with something shifting deep between the hornwort. Like an artist, I will return to this as if it is a canvas over and over again attempting to capture the light, but will stand naked and aching in my sheer incompetence. So, bury me in a suit made of jade enclose this yearning in its green cold skin and like an empress I will walk among the living to remember the depth and burden of each moment as if it were new.

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." --Haruki Murakani My lawnmower has arranged the snake's bones in sharp angles. A painful trigonometry. He bends into his oncoming death. The mercy of a rock not soon enough. I am counting the seconds until he ceases to kink in unnatural twists, finally unfurling in soft curls to transcend the grip of life. He leaves behind the lesson of the two arrows in the quiver. The first an inevitable shooting along neural pathways. The second never to be aimed or raised to an open, peaceful sky.