ii.
i can't even remember
if in the dream we had made it out alive
the language of the land we were in
or whether there were others--
adorations of my younger years--don't call them lovers--
surfaced as i crouched in that tunnel
that island that cave that barn that
burnt out old motel even the sex workers said was sketchy
crouched in that beach shack
below the palmtree for days
there was some stray unpaired magnetism still
somehow waiting for the music to start
while my love tightened the tourniquet with her eyes
and the sand swallowed what must have been blood
and the whales followed the one desperate comrade to the smell of despair
and i don't remember if the animals were well fed
or if in the basement we shouldered our hope and dreamt of stairways
or if one soldier had some wine
or if there was a young loon or just a painting of one--
i can't imagine stalling but what if i was
watching the wholesale wasting of memories
while they counted the final votes in the lingering counties
as if one could decode the horror
or one could end the siege
or one could make of the deserted metropolis a fabulous matrix of waves the distant future
despite being a hall of doorways
was buried in the wall
like a little mouse
with plenty of fear
i cannot imagine i was in love
but i might have dreamt of it
one thousand times and one thousand
more in a single night --it wouldn't have been like me
--all given up and resigned-- but i can't remember how i was supposed to have been
in the version of all of this where there was you
and the petals in the center of the dahlia took on the wild curl
of the hair that hung below the ear of summer
and my heart drew my hand up to cover it for it was lucid and bare to the world
v.
i remember how i was in love
and i couldn't move i was so lonely i remember living in the car--
the smell the cold makes
i have loved dog after dog
and could barely leave and left
i have a sharp grudge against just one person
but even that will fade with time
i'm not sure why i'm telling you this today--
maybe because the sky is clearing and the clouds are gold
maybe because i laid in the dark for hours and hours
trying to measure the weights of things
weightless as time and darkness and got nowhere i
was thinking about pastures
without thinking about grass--when truth
was a hungry not-quite-yearling relying
on the unproven idea of the end of winter--
on some silver far off moment
that didn't even know itself yet--so i resolved to try
to love something new
enough to leave the rest behind --for years
my goal was to do just this
to watch the sun come up on the farm at the edge of the world
to hear my pen scratch out something
my brain didn't say--
and i've hunched over a hundred tables
listening to the livestock and the symphony of air through an old barn
but now they all seem to wonder what i'm still doing here
so i listen to the sound my pencil makes
and search for messages
and instructions for the future and signs
of the glowing lifeform
in the alien raffia of wild grass in winter
the inlays on the shells of the urchins
the liquid turquoise and sapphire of the humanless
and the creeping inscription
of lichen across the ledge scraped raw
where the farm walks into the sea
Peter Kirn is a poet and a homesteader/farmer. He lived on the move for many years and now lives in a small offgrid cabin, on his homestead, with a dog, in a rural town, on the northernmost coast of Maine.
