From “Love Letter to the Future: A Book of the Land in Eight Acts”

Fog spun into silk

              on the knee of the comptroller,

              propelled toward the crest of Ontario,

              the old, faded star, steambreath onto the windshield.

To orient in the finest sense

              of cackles, mute chrysanthemums,

              funneling inordinate nakedness,

              absorbed, absorbed, immediately absorbed.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhh,

we stay

limber,

each line

choreographed

from a tremendous mouthful

of swamp, skunk cabbage

              brining at the jowls,

              acquiesced to pestilence,

              and exaggerated diffidence.

Do you know what it is to clamp your shell

              an extra foot into the silt riverbank,

              kissing the soles of passersby,

              silky grains churning the earth over?

Makeshift ceremonial dances,

              fine textiles culled from thrift store bins

              display brightly-colored throats who feed

              stacks of cash killed on recycled names.

There is a golden tapestry

              on the berry-stained

              bottom of Wealth Woman’s

              basket of abalone.

              Beneath it are the exhausted

              faces of her babies

              grown old in the length

              of the inhale, and a facsimile

              remains from all the cycles

              spilled over, since nature

              cannot acid wash, since

              frizz canvassing the ozone

              always carries over.

Geometry for days, countless days,

              spin-cycled through a craftsman’s

              circumpolar hands. There’s always

              another grotto or chamber

              where things dwell, they say.

              Wandering skitterers we are,

              the Northern Lights vacuum pried-open skulls.

                            We cover ourselves with hides and entrails,

                            overripe elderberries, looking to steal a moment

                            of letup from the glare. The limbs of the Old Ones

                            shunt aside bare toes, stripped solid

                            and indifferent as a bear’s den

                            or an ant’s apartment.

Don’t be so much in charge, the frogs say,

              of coalescing wolverine trails

              huddled in 60-million-year pellet tracks

              when the wetlands dried out.

The way soaked, green corpuscles

              rasp each other’s mouths and hands

              braiding the woof of God’s mind,

              that’s how it is, says

              the giant rat’s captive wife.

Even if you can only faintly hear

              the eighth narrative told in the corner

              of the babbling wooden-slat house,

              that is enough leftover hooligan grease

              for the gods with killer whale ganglia.

Knuckles rasp proscenium floorboards,

              splattering herring peck at scops owl’s waist,

              spruce branch

              lowered,

              scrapes conglomerate bedrock.

Mother-in-law’s atonic hands lunge for stewed milt.

One can conclude it’s a virus

              to plant burdensome layers

              of topographic crust on self-renewing

              limbs, like there was more to it

              than rustling fingers at the end of the line.

All components must be in order,

              or it’s an ulcer here, a bladder infection

              there, a baked-out parking lot,

              fizzing in trampled-over, chastened hairlines.

Hold, hold, hold, hold in your palms

              the Steller’s jay that beats its wings

              on glaciers lying high and straight

              over rivers slicing into cool nettles.

Sea lions suck up a quick breath, dive

              and waft on the outskirts of ballerinas

              who gyrate in like-mind

              to classics bubbling up from Sedna’s citadels.

I’m here to show you what you can do

              with this sandbar dialect,

              says the humpback whale

              and the goatsbeard moss, and the ore

              of iron oxide in the shoreline cliff.

You must trust, she says,

                            your swimming blood, joints

                            lumbering in shadows, the dolphin

                            clicking out to you, far above ground.

                            And we should feed just as much as eat,

                            says the heart your body formed around.