Most of all, it is you I miss, you,
and owls, you, and the snap of cold in late February,
I brake beneath an overpass when a train travels on it,
overhead, noise, within, more in a poem once I read the line:
“When I say ‘you’ in my poems,
I mean you,” this too is true of me, and my poems
Hold close me now, I tell the train-sound,
I will here sit until I can again to you say, to you again
I say it is you that I need, and underneath
the weight of the keening wind, rail-tracks each time
your name I speak to myself I press my lips to dirt, to infant
mosses in the heart of the eye of an owl is a world,
in the world what I see is you,
and what I hear are the words
that I am wholly and sorely in need of saying: Love, Miss, Need,
you this is my unadorned letter
to you; there is a train overhead,
and moss beneath my lips it is your way that I wish to hurtle, desperately
and with great abandon once I heard a poet say
the phrase: “conflict with a God,”
to you I release the beasts, tenfold legions, it is for you
I look to the owl’s eye this is the only way I could think
to tell you that for you I bend, press my lips to dirt,
to infant mosses, to a thousand leagues of green
in a poem once I read the line: “what is the wind, what is it,”
with this I swear, to a thousand leagues of longing:
when I say most of all, what I mean is you,
when I say you, what I mean is you, when I say what is
the wind, what is it, what I mean is you, when I say conflict with a
God, what I mean is you
9.7 / July 2014