Be silent always when you doubt your sense;
And speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence:

---I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
...In my beginning is my end.

Beauty, beauty, beauty, beauty, Silence.

Beauty, beauty, beauty, beauty, beauty, beauty,
beauty, beauty, beauty, beauty, Silence. Hands
and and night and morning
shadows and here and gone and
words and silence. Not to touch
because

I am wrapped in my childhood comforter,
and it is enough around me to keep off cold through cracks a century coming, a century like chimes pealing, peeling off, years falling away like leaves dropped and it’s still clingy autumn here:

but I’m building walls of books, too,
because in my bed they help to keep of the cold and for all its warmth Dixie sure has biting nights that even three years north of the Mason-Dixon have not yet taught me to love, and the books are enough, enough enough:

but I’m wooling my mind with words,
tangled like click, click, click I never learned to knit properly so I really should put these needles aside and just crochet, but it’s diverting to knot phrases in unfamiliar ways and everything here is so familiar that it’s a comfort, really, so I need these words to unwind me:

but walking these roads I feel at home,
in place, in peace, embraced, and sure as ever that my autumns will drop on red clay like it doesn’t matter how fertile the soil is I’ll grow here, dammit, and there’s nowhere else I’d rather be no other words I’d rather weave no, no nothing else I’d rather read no, no no way else I’d rather sleep:

but these are not my thoughts,
my thoughts are very different.

Dance barefoot on the ice.
Feel the ice.
Slip.

Roll in the snow and wash it all off.
Wash it all off.
Forget.

Untitled II

Not long like standing three paused-steps outside of your door or long like the catch between breaths that could cascade speech-ways or sigh-ways or impishly my-ways or long like the decades (I swear) we've been lip-locked while civilizations bloomed and burned with rivelets and rust and not even the Romans ruled breadths and depths like those wrapped in our embrace because we sweat for that which we can't touch and touch anyways with hands like oil on skin that is more beautiful than any marble broken into idea(l?)s and write our own religion with strokes of trust and flourishes of why the hell not look like fools and make mistakes and enjoy creating and cleaning up our own messes with these hands cleansed holy by heart to hip to hunger-shudders of shared dominion of bodies we'll only have for a moment and not long like that moment no not long at all.