Phillip Foss
First Day of a Year Measured in Nights

perhaps in a hundred years I will discover this
and remember • perhaps
I discovered • remembered :

countenances • each billion un-remembered

like fingers at the loom counting threads ; metaphor
for any mutation desired ;

this is the gesture with which summer’s foliage in winter
releases the sky • breathe blue • color lung
since all thing is loss

discarded in every shelter • memorabilia
of each sentience • their detritus
is loved : yucca sandal • silk brasserie

then do I believe in the dearticulation
of any one • in the way that sand
is no longer stone • no longer mountain • not planet

still the clothing worn by earth is only the midden
of its dead • not an idea
recoverable • even in its vocabulary of mandibles • largely

unmeasured • the sea is undermining my continent

*

this is a natural history :
rain’s exact angle is not mechanics but memory
lost trajectories

of desire succoring what soil deems worthy • finger
of hummingbird expatriates like a slogan :
the mummers’ paradox is to incorporate
the sky into the mask

so the beginning was a serrated dawn ;
past and imagining folded
like the edge of a paper fan

on which is painted blind men on a log bridge :

this is natural law : reformed forms of oppression

*

can I assimilate the beauty of women ?

stones are sounds : the voice of breaking
or of the motionless • this juxtaposition
is visual • not acoustic

still • walking through the market • I perceived humanity
as disease • loved most
( each moment I construct • attempt
to reconstruct • as memory )
sad • beautiful
disease ; be thou crystalline geode
( my memory is empty )
in the same way that the sexual eyes
of women are inhuman vocalizations
are refracting
stones

*

this is an indifferent language • a kind of litter
strewing the watercourse where I walk
asleep :                 nothing
                               can arrive
                               nothing can depart

                               no thing can be

                                                              lived
                                                              lieved

I wash my hands
of its waters :
                including manifestations of the miraculous :

I am not the cactus eaten in famine
I am not a loon built of star
I am not the moon sipped from the hand

( there is causality for this : the flying raven
                                   dropping the hare’s head in the yard )

*

abandoned nests ornament leafless trees ;
was I causal in this desecration ?

while I practice the agitation of molecules one raven
strokes past my window lamenting
the infinity of snowflakes :

any such rendering is only phenology tracked
through ideology • as the cry
of the crane falls toward frozen ground

thus not of • but • nature • as a mushroom
pushing up half frozen ground at christmas
yet mushroom is not kingfisher ; still
there can be no difference

: I dreamt this as a landscape flooded with dark water
foregrounded by the seer ricocheting
billiard ball between white and silver tree trunks

in this I had assumed time was measured vertically