[of what hands had been]


  I accept this place. Rain,
  capable of everything

  except washing the blood, tints
  our private

  shoreline. This end
  of small arms, of what hands

  had been. I want
  to hold you

  with an urgency
  no syllable will unknot.



  [avoiding the rocks]


  In the place of which you say stars, palms, & hunger lie
  a short distance apart, no structure shelters

  meaning. The space between rocks avoiding the rocks.
  You say the body moves with the river it's watching. I didn't know
  what to look at so my eyes turned toward an imaginary

  island, where the ungroundedness of waves constitutes
  the violence, a pattern that leaves no edge of the woven.