1.

their hands pack and palm a raw until it unseams smooth

one of them thinks I’ll make a jar for baby teeth, another wants

a singing kettle, seven cups for wine of windy grapes.

Above their wheels they lean and punch their elbows to their guts,

spin the clay with water. Under their clawing it quivers, faints

into a slick. But they press their hands into its give.

With wet prodding the spheres, like stars, collapse, but thinly twist

To heightly hollows; bowed—swan bowls. The ones who can unfurl the sides

To muscled flank are the ones who watch for what it wants.

2.

presuppose the universe hangs about you in fine threads

of burnt lace and ever pulse and joint-pull is a breaking through.

Sunset all strung up with the star clots, woods a s-tring

of hard and bird and ancient emerald frailed into grit-green leaf.

Assume we are a woven thing—(some say our shaking mountains

show we are the drapery on some holy knee–) our woolen earth,

the whale tooth moon, this whole screaming spin. But there are wells

where trees once were—a poet can see

small spaces in the stitch, a severance of our endlessness.

3.

we roll now, your hold grips my hips and I know all

gathering things, how the shore collects the tide again and again.

Your slow yawn shows me canyons, wide and stale-stoned, silt of salt and spice

in the cradle. When your words stop I know what silence is above us,

among the nerves of stars. Once you pushed me from you and now I’ve felt below

the earth, an inhuman bottom—when you’ve cried I’ve heard a tendon slowly town

from bone. I’ve escaped any coiled logic, save my seizuring interior,

in each of your small gestures: open worlds, layered sifts of light.

In the brown of your irises I see red and green and leaping.