Michael Ives — Two poems

Night Lung

                                  for Mary

let breath stare
at deepest blue
of lung of labor
allow, form the lung
into bracts, into these
roiled surfaces within bracts
into night, swimming under face
letting true water flow, an assuagement
and after the assuagement, songs, after songs
more burning maps
allow the lungs’ blue to re-awaken
into deepest blue of three birds against vast tableform of nightcloud re-kinged
where time bells the vine, bells the wine, air beating its twelve indigo wings
where time slows, time knows, its spleen dipped in wine, the hour starthroated
draught of fishes where once a bed, the nightair beating time, man, and woman into
slow forage of impulse, year of meteors
smoke gathering, dream’s interior blowing on its anthers
was not  (now was) calls the distribution of minutes a smoke thickening in chest
one person is, then was two, now many
the hours seeded, smoke gathering into time, chest a forest of impulses cresting
of imaginary animal, river in the shape of a fist, into the open palm it flows into
you lounges, night labors, is
was, and is again on to another part of you
whether man-, woman-, breath-, or time-,  part of you
onto or into river of you again  
and again
endlessly

Plunged   (whose vital parts)

    among waterwheels away to shoals of sessional topaz at twilight when sweet gum fruitcome down into the infant’s palm

         transpells the daynight hinge tangled in months and wildly thereunto as smoke from over the rooftops invented the lambing the mysteries without pilot

         in such that the word as with super-added arrow over its how as the direction in which as points as toward the properties of a thing

         as is oriented to face their hosts back for the purpose of heightening our sensation that time is confronted while we remain its mystagogues its Tantalids

         immediately we walk as from unlikely wisps of memory pulverized which burns a bone-colored flame but not forever nor at wooded edge any doubt

         but that something as I walk struggles to escape speak though as to what constitutes its words are penned in cannot say whether by beings laws memories

         but such a one as communicates to me whose vital parts share a unique moment in space with mine I have determined by following an unexplained filament under the skin

         from the midriff down to the distinct impression a woman bides with me but that she is upside down with respect to a vertical orientation is more than a fond surmise that relative to a

         dorso-ventral axis she would disbutton along my spine to reveal her breasts to the oaks at my back