(The Sounds Of Earth)

Tonight, each dark shape is a dead animal

On the roof, I saw the corpse of a dog at my feet

Then a deer, its legs dangled over the ledge

I talk a lot about a lot of things

Self-hatred, UFOs, loneliness

I talk and talk and talk, and still my bedside is expectant

Whose shape would I call forth from the night

If I had such a moonly power?

I thought of them today

They told me a fable about the philtrum

We kissed, in the basement of the chapel

Not them, though I grew thirsty for their eyelashes

Nor him, the blue-eyed exam

Nor her, the forlorn marble

Perhaps you, you latest daythought

It is summer, which is our season

I drank too deep from the cup of my memories

The bottom was only a mirror, and I couldn’t peer past myself

To find your shoulders, turning away

No, the thing I would summon has nothing like a name

It is nothing like a person

Though a man once wore its shadow

And brimmed me with desert stars

It is nothing like a place

Though I have walked the rain-black woods

And the mud is still on my feet

It is nothing like a time

Though it is often past midnight, and full-mooned

It is probably death

But I don’t want to die

I don’t want you, I want your peaches

The ones we ate in your wide white bed

The bitter skin split between my teeth

My whole July turned sweet