THE LONG BUS GLIDES

The way you hold a book
like you want a body more than paper
to love you. I swim
across a pond of milk. How beauty
wants a witness proof
doesn’t plead. So,
your illegible tee shirts
feigning outsidership. Trick
signs, every one of us compelled.
Put your lips against my
scratched records, say
you shut yourself in your room
one Christmas, fell asleep
to the slow burning of electric color.

The long bus glides along the road outside
the hospital. Pulled by invisible
string, tethered to cumulo-
nimbus. Numbered pinholes
in my back reach
for mistaken cells threaded
to harmless antigens. Silent engine.
Apparatus, displaced national howling.
Silent effort. Metal heat
cutting molecules in its way.
It seems like the air wishes it through,
this bus, graceful flounder, Northern
Pike. When the current alone
lifts the translucent
architecture
of her fins.

To be unwound
by highways fields cigarettes tank tops random mathematics
but not unraveled? A body that could
escape itself but won’t. Beauty equals
distance divided by (not minus) force.
A ghost of its sister,
intention.

Don’t try so hard
When you’re not looking
But what about
Fish mouths
tearing on hooks or
The lake is just a swamp.


Effort contains the shadow of its goal.
I prefer to eat out.