Our bodies are full of veins and yet

Our bodies are full of veins and yet

we do not ever notice. The trees that came

in a shower of red as we too felt

the ground pushing up against us

are now thrusting out and up and still

we are pumped down as something else

in us pushes to be out. A flock of birds

growing dark on a branch are knobs

of the tree, but softer, and when

they startle, all at once, is it because

something has flown up in our ribs

and cannot move any further.

The birds are always breaking and

re-gathering. They land on the same

tree again and again, and we cannot

even stop looking. Before the warmth

began to invade, I had already felt sleep

being pushed out, the thick comfort

of winter moving to make way for what,

that peculiar terror that comes, when,

having lived for years in a house not 

especially loved, someone wakes up

to each of the vases gone, and finds

herself instead in an orchard filled

with crabapple trees. What’s worse

is that the trees are beautiful.

How can anyone who passes by them,

singing, ignore them, those leaves

thrumming into green, arching for the red

buried in lips and palms, the color they cannot

have until they are dying, and when

your back grows with a cut I put

my mouth on it. You are only the flight

of blood in migration again and again

and when I touch you I cannot disappear.

It is not that we grow dimmer as night comes,

but that colors converge, and only then

do I know that there is nothing telling me

who you are—not the sharp trees behind us,

not the clearness of the bricks—with their colors, 

the way a boy passing by the river makes

shadow animals with his hands and doesn’t

even know where the light is coming from.

He moves his thumb to make the wolf bite,

then one creature breaks into two

and they are both dancing, and when

the boy goes home it’s not that he doesn’t

notice the light on the trees is suddenly

thicker but that he’s thinking of how

the sound of the river could help him pretend

to be underwater if only he closed his eyes,

and each of the lights taste like nothing

you or I have ever tasted. If only

the light could remember voices,

remember music pearling across leaves

and breaking in the center of a grove

of trees with bark inches rougher

than any grain of our flesh, would it be

as if we were there and again there,

would the boy singing with his hands

as he crosses the river at night know

that music could never bring her back, but

it can make them cry, and something

might remember us, the way the grooves

in the branches of the tree must

remember, over and again, the dip

under the weight of birds.