There I am all head beside a window, sunlight
turning bright yellow 

walls to mud-shades,
darkening greens.  Nothing moves.  I am 

dreaming or constructing a death.
My left arm hangs.  My right 

balances on the flat wood of the sill.
It is not far to the ground.  It 

is never not far to the ground.
I dream:  my parents stroll arm in arm. 

Or my father waits among columns for the train.
There is sequence:  all those bodies

escaping the station until there is nothing 
but tubes of air,

weeping concrete. 
A bird’s body moving headless,

then flaring
in a crucifixion of flight...

Dreamed, veiled reflection, untitled.
Slow swirl at the edge of a

sea. 
The grand panels of summer

bleeding in cloud shapes
to autumn dusk.  There is this sense now

of oil filling the ear—
oil warmed in tap water—

cotton stuffed in the hollows,
so I am deaf again and on my back,

the vaporizer churning.
And beside it all—one shade—drawn—

flexing like a drumhead,
saturated with bands of orange 

where the paper is thin, but then rendered
opaque, thrilling,

then shot again with unburied light.  
This, the skin of the world, 

nineteen-something-nothing.  My 
ears packed with oil, eyes

pinched to cracks. The shade purpling,            
then flashing to magenta,

settling blue.  It, too, alive, wildly breathing.