The crockery of Heaven clanks and wanders
in a movement so immense it seems
like stillness when we're out back
on a blanket, watching the dark dust
enter roofs and leaves and then
part vaguely for the airplanes, pinkish
and edgy and slow as the approach
of a disaster. We're a family, we're in love
with what it seems we’re feeling
and we don't know what to say.
God or the color of our sensation
brings small, barn-shaped impressions
through our shoulderblades, which makes us
shiver and think of other lives
behind us, to which we might turn
smiling and confused. But we don't.
We say, "Look at that bright one
over there by the plum tree, the one
wiping its eyes."

My loneliness is a secret machine,
a flying featherbed in the blue
of a hydrangea like those we set
beside the fence in Padua.
It is the language of shells, this
condition. The priest in his little room
at midnight hears it
just under the voice of his shoe
as he places it among his world of things.
The woman lying naked by someone
she detests hears it in the roar
of his breath. So it is not really mine
alone, though it is exquisitely
of myself alone in the tide and hum
of all separations, in the doorlatch
snapping to and in wood
creaking under bodies moving off
like clouds before the wind
that never comes back. So much is vacant
glance and the counting of change.
So much is the nave collapsed
and forgetting its lines and it seems
I am like others, I don’t know
which of the dead believed me when I said
I’m here with a message
Does anyone want a secret that flies
invisibly in its color,
that runs on like the mind
of a moon?