“Wilderlands”

From here, my hands make empty tools,
a clumsy bone and nail architecture
holding on to little of what surounds me.
Here’s a pen. I drop it. Here’s a ticket. I drop it.
A dunce choreography just to produce a cut finger,
a bruised palm, a tiny scratch difference
between now and the now that once was now,
but now it isn’t. I have lost that already.

This now I cannot find is an attempt
to make the body’s cartography from space
where all things look amorphous,
but perhaps you can make sense of me,
of all these crazy terrains.
Form infographs for the stray hairs
and a key to what remains of casual sex.
Starting at the brain, draw highways
past the heart to my childhood,
bypass the formative years.
Create signs in Seattle, Italy
wherever the congestion goes gangster
and cells pop like pistols
in Baltimore’s Cherry Hill.
Abandon the throat to poor construction.
Instead trace fault lines to spine,
spreading as a river centipede
feeding liver, appendix, ocean –
slicing across the salmon belly
dropping blood-colored eggs,
the shape of a man becoming,
the seed rollable on the tongue.

You could make sense of these wilderlands.
Crater and empire, knolls and sluice –
a war between disparate fluids
and fast materials like the kidney, the lung,
the birthday I lost my virginity
to a woman with the same name as my brother.
Piled together, balled up, then flattened
until the end-to-end itself becomes lost,
an agent of my scant abilities
to discern which now it is we are now in,
an what year it is I was supposed to have children
or bought a house or graduated as a doctor
or made that classic album or scripted a play
or seen the Greek Isles or been the one in the room
that everyone wanted to talk to, but didn’t.
Instead, I can’t recall the boyfriend from Cherry Hill
or the face belonging to my first pair of exposed breasts,
or the feeling of having a father I didn’t think of
as incompetent.

You can make sense of these scars
at my ankle and the sloping of my forehead.
You could assemble the melee
into named deserts, national borders,
and give a key to the mongrel thrushes
in my head, the angry elk in my stomach
and my cock’s insatiable predation.
Then, I could locate muscles that swell
around a pen or a ticket or the death
of my last lover’s affection. I could grasp
each year instead of sorrow.
Become decipherable, visible, new.