HOLOGRAM

Small spiders cling to the green

filaments, the evening nearly gone,

the mad, their dizzy skin

depending from the dark wind

that streams across a feather,

the moon’s leaves, the mare’s brow.

Everywhere the human hand is powerful.

Ask the dogs of war, the dogs.

And the body is not to be

regarded as the least ingredient of love,

since the time it is born

again it is born

without a mouth.

It is longer than lightning.

Where the hospital stands on waterlilies,

on stilts of yellow wax, you are

grafting another coat of skin.

Pain over bone, piecework.

It was this so black a night

you burst out the screen door,

an X tearing at the spot

a plane went down before you

collapsed on the lawn, your

neon robe.  And life

got to be how to be

rid of the remorse they found

curled below the bedroom window

you had nailed open just so far.

Even if you dream you take

a key from your wallet,

the old kind, it’s the bone

of a doll’s arm, with a hand.

Even if you throw it across the yard,

a door locks in the air

before it hits the ground.

It is true it is night.

There is a naked figure

come upright to the field.

Call it rain, a tree

in the rain, and call happy

the one who reaches up and turns

off the stars, like faucets.

For the wicked are not only driven

by this storm, their eyes

of sandpaper, their legs

tired wars.  But the mild, too,

and those like you whose

constant hope is there is

nothing human in this sky.