Time split like a fruit between dark and light
and a usual fog drags
over this landfall
I’ve walked September end to end
barefoot room to room
carrying in hand a knife well honed for cutting stem or root
or wick eyes open
to abalone shells memorial candle flames
split lemons roses laid
along charring logs Gorgeous things
: : dull acres of developed land as we had named it: Nowhere
wetland burnt garbage looming at its heart
gunmetal thicket midnightblue blood and
tricking masks I thought I knew
history was not a novel

So can I say it was not I listed as Innocence
betrayed you serving (and protesting always)
the motives of my government
thinking we’d scratch out a place
where poetry old subversive shape
grew out of Nowhere here?
where skin could lie on skin
a place “outside the limits”

Can say I was mistaken?
To be so bruised: in the soft organs skeins of consciousness
Over and over have let it be
damage to others crushing of the animate core
that tone-deaf cutloose ego swarming the world
so bruised: heart spleen long inflamed ribbons of the guts
the spine’s vertical necklace swaying

Have let it swarm
through us let it happen
as it must, inmost

but before this: long before this those other eyes
frontally exposed themselves and spoke