Answers

Do you keep a tiger as a pet, stripes made of sky and highway, and how do you feed him if his teeth are walking through every room?

It seems the sharpest surfaces desire prey, a crushing expanse. It's all I can fathom, what you might call tripping across fire-ready thresholds-- I am new to myself each time.

In the light of empty bowls, how do you trace destination back to source when every wall is mirrored?

I fill them with the bow-shaped petals of stars, the ones furthest from sleep. They creep into me as a lattice. I am climbing, climbing to the convex eye, whose motion is all I need to echo there.

Why are stairways green when you conjugate irises, flooding them with larvae and rice?

Endings, like winters, begin with fuschia vistas. I bring my decay in satchels, and if they can feed off sightlessness, a proliferant body, my thoughts will spawn, crystallize (upward as curve) a film of dew-sky, and I will rise from the startling waters, floating among ice-laden floes.

How many times did you say "yes" when you ambled through the winter, cringing like a peacock in full bloom?

It could have been snow or rain, no answer yet to form, though it would have required an unbearable temperature, and I can only name one Fahrenheit, strutting, as she did, as you did, not drowsing-- either way, a novial gold, numberless.

The heat is there, even under monuments and aftershock. How do you draw it from the water, as if through a straw, as if it is part of your skeleton?

Can I count the heats I have lost, pulled up through me as if, as if-- here, an inversion of silence? Joints consoled through words, tongues like movable thorns. The bedrock shifts into our "awake." This is my permanence.

I heard someone laugh as he buried my decorated scalp. How do you get there without breaking in three?

The way thunder's dimensions separate you from him, adorns you with a sentience, a titanium of river, white as the first bone formed & split. The way lightning swims down to earth, eel-like, its tooth glistening against your breast.

Are you a satellite, sweet with crevices, happening to arrive?

More a meteor, as opaque as you've dreamed, skies diving in, burrowing as I flash across blue spruces, skyscrapers, that steady mine-light travelling the ore of my blood-- the forest's murmur you also drink.

You are there, among visionless water and shore. How do you see past autumn, so much reflection of maple and release?

It is possible to breathe again, as fir tree bark stripped from its oil-faded climate. If I am Pompeii, my ash lining orbitals, a peopled clay sees through its obsidian outline, and I am resolved, leaning, leaning . . .

What does it take to wrap you in planets, hold you in twisted gravity, delineate the source of this vibration?

To know, compress me in the ember-wet dawn, print your lotus fragrances, dry-leafed pages on wavelengths scripted in sand-- for I cannot tell where gravities amass, if not in the graspless geographies of sound.