193. Twa and Trois

II.

with the twilight and extending into evening

with the twilight and extending through the day

parcels of light in twos and threes
each growing or shrinking everyone’s breath

How much light can you hold in your hand?

How much light would you want to?

fire is the warmest way through twilight

there are three of them burning into black

there are two of them burning into bright

I can see through the blades with my face on the grass
how the light catches like water and drains into earth

breath, and the light through its breathing

breached, and the earth on its back

we are supine and given over to the sun as it rises

we are prone and servant of sleep as it falls

what we take in is what we’re wont to do

light and air and dew

flight and flair, and doing

either the birds awake as voices into growing light
or the birds asleep are choices like darkness on the skin

the sun is the light of the skin of the earth

the sun is the light of the skin of the earth

we see in warmth and walking over earth
that we are walking through and forth

that earth is waking as it makes
that earth has taken what it can’t take


III.

within the night and moving as if right

within the night and moving towards light

night as the audience of self, and restless

night that occupies whatever it might fill

what slips through and onto and into is night

what disappears into what it hides from us is night

live behind windows in cubes of light

live in illusion that there’s no night

what whistles is wind as dark as it might

what whistles’s the radiators trying to find
the edge of the night where the cold’s coming in,
the lip of the cold where the night’s taken berth

and we are the grand progenitors of the earth

and we are the creators of all we perceive

here in the smallest space of existence, here in
the tiny carapace of thought, here in the first
and the last of our thinking, here in our heads

fires’re dying and heat it is seeping
away into drains of the body that loses
grip of the heat that it’s made and released

everything’s night and the only illusion

everything’s night, and the only illusion
is that light is among us and growing in warmth,
that cold doesn’t surround us in darkness and shroud

but it is sleep that comes

and slips into us

but it is sleep that comes

and lowers us into

but it is sleep that erases the creases and fissures

it is sleep that believes in what we can wonder

it is sleep that expands into all we believe

sleep, temporary sleep