Because the school bus
blows grit on my door-resting hand,
because I don’t know the notes that
fall with birch-yellow leaves in the bright
spot ahead, so many they twitter air to shards,
because what this makes me feel
it isn’t surfaced, so fingers can’t call it
cervix-quiet—it just isn’t: horizon-line
of scent, any, cutting towards me in the dark,
or, even sidelong, glints or knives (quickening
unused; anyway, felt, it’s another); no
rush up from the bed where algae blooms bright
dark on rocks through lake water metallic, blood on
the tongue. The calculated tumble down.
What’s left is a break to split air into

water on the one hand, nothing, on the
other, nothing to breathe through to what I
cannot unthread, mud that dries chalking from my
hands up to wrists. I’d really like
something—the hard skim between me and the rest
of it, the plane felt and gone over, surface
tense, created by my skin on it—to
attend the quick cooling skin of my speech
slicking air, lay flat skin that isn’t me.
Something that isn’t this. To show up, spread rough.

( About disappear: the word surfaces.
the car clunks, past Hawley Road and the turn-off
to Ashfield Lake it connects sinks
the word sinks in like teeth to tasty
flesh, like teeth unsheathe hooks inside paunches
it connects; I comply with a full-fledged slash
and burn and something showier, precise. With
props, aids to describe the outline of taut.
What’s left is what, daily, watched with
flash-freeze-frames so resplendent they had to be
gouged, burned blue for the comfort of the poor
upholstered body—that I entered, to be interred,
in this mute road)