1. Leda's Loss

Mid-air Y in the will

Then in the marsh, searching for the swan
Leda sent home to die upon lake- light filled with skylark,
great rail warblers, pond birds, keepers of tremor.

Y, with folded wing, follows the rush way,
the orpheans dueling the long song season
their dusk notes finishing a being. A heart finally stops.
Birds wrestle the branches.    Under hemlock pleasure,
pale information                               couples with phosphor in the marsh,
multiplying with small smashes                     and starts into stars
reposing narratives lying-in-wait

fringed orchids,                     bracken holding a death press

2. Of a Swan

Y sees all from her oval in the bare
earth: flat country sun flooding backwards
during the crash. How just before
Leda blinded swan, her fingers in blood

air. Y hasn't flown for weeks,
skills still inside body sheltering
what will soon be with see-through-bones,
a feel for sky.     She guides Leda through

gentian, pitcher plants ravenous and huge
to a fading radiance, swan collapsed, mute as page-
fall. He slides from her arms like a great ruined
dress.   Already, the marsh birds are upon him,

                              their subsong drowning the sound
of Leda leaving, light as a daughter held long in,
              tired of knowledge

3. Conjuring a Language *

Y crashes down, feet first,
between untended flares,
singeing a few underfeathers.

                She roams in the scattering black


                                                                                                            stars off

past exquisite poisons
prisming the parks, a helmet-shrike
testing cinnamon rocks,
a paper ship that in another light
is a boy dreaming

                                               that death is sometimes a bird throned
upon her landfill, rose-white, jeweled above the spree. Y
sails with boy on his tattered boat,

teaching him decomposition, the ways of styrofoam, scrap iron,
string.   How to be incomplete.    Flying him




               through raspy metaphoric conditions, recent vocabularies,
ambiguities.

               Far removed from his original, he has forgotten it.
Become repeated form                                           precarious



                                             dark spot on the other side of say.

As Y drops him from her beak, he falls through pearl
                and the odd stray things he has thought about or once held
                                 in his hands and set afloat upon
                                                 the glittering rupture of a stream


disintegrating into random          line, curve, argument, sign,

                                                      index for the possible

3. Conjuring A Language : published in Samizdat and The Possibility of Language, Seven New Poets, Ed. Jeff Roessner, Samizdat Editions, 2000.