from DIRGE: a ballet for 13 dancers [fragment- hymns]

The planes flew through your chest at high speed because someone called you sky, and you wanted to believe.

Ghost planes with no one onboard except robots counting dollhouse packages—or elegant military birds.

No one had the heart to tell you that light didn’t need us.

The field of yellow buttercups indicated we were all lying.

You’ll remember the hieroglyph tablets, black-plumed ibises.

Ideas of a shining place weren’t imagined in a day.

The afterworld might be a softened spectacle.

I was memorizing something to tell you, but it fell apart.

There were intricate ways to express one thing but no method to account for everything.

The lecture on neuroplasticity didn’t explain why subjects stopped looking for dimensions without air.

Deities should then be removed from the book in the form of a question.

Some of us were living in square houses even though we were circles.

The traveling philosopher reassured things would get better before he and his triangular suitcase fell off the grid.

He didn’t charge us, didn’t covet our cloaks.

His mother was a soprano who died singing an aria to a sold-out audience; she was a circle, he said.     

The director wept for a year, a small ocean.

I haven’t listened to your messages because I can’t remember which room holds objects, what should stay private, how to spell.   

The chorus agrees I’m not sleepwalking underwater but swimming through watercolors without sound.

Peacock blue to yellow, I’ll swim to green, regenerate enthusiasm, a missing organ.

Sleep doesn’t always give back dream.

When you come back, we’ll tango in a slow-motion montage, knowing love isn’t a small boat on a reservoir of promises.

More 911 calls, donations of blood, identifications.   

Heartbreak ensconces eternity.

You missed your appointment with the person who was supposed to help you.

Fatigued from sky, aloof falcons, desperate for a new paradigm.

At night you hold me against the river’s rush and wash my tangled hair.

The chorus circumscribes us, chanting everything could be temporal, even a sequence of fragment-hymns.