Goodnight Architecture
________________________________________________________

i.

When I hold the dead girl, the small of her back locates me
while all around us lilies breathe their toxic sweetness
and grasses move in wind like cilia.
The midnight exhausted with stars is from a previous eon.
Voices of sheets decompose us into pure consciousness.
God does not live here.
The gutted buds expose themselves
as slaughtered animals on the lawn.
I do not want to huddle before the fever together.
Go ahead, cop out on me.
In a dormant lullaby, trees narrate otherness and sky and a hand
                touching the brow.
I am not lost, dear one.
We can love the life back into each other—even from this distance.
The long neck of childhood is only shadow feeding upon shadow;
a subtext of origins. How could I have been so stupid?
You were no more my mother than I yours.

ii.

Whatever I needed to know, I have gone on without.
Even the clasped bodies of lovers
turning and turning in sheets
(is the world art?) will pause for the light’s perfunctory look.
Perhaps the door breaks a subtler silence.
Like an underwater language from my hand to yours,
the morning ignites us.
My mother stands on the far bank near the bed.
In unison, two little girls say, hold me.
Burnt-out trees appear prehistoric.
Can anything live there?
In one dominion, I never reach her
and in another I never leave.
A black dog that won’t let anyone touch it follows me.
The disinterested urn is stuck in the dirt.
Whatever I touch turns to grief.