Heart at Home

. . the bliss youth dreams is one For daylight, for the cheerful sun, For feeling nerves and living breath-...She looked at me eyes filled with tears and said "Sorry I'm afraid of you"-You swam through walls as if they'd dissolved, breathed in your pores. Under fluid fields of stars midnight was all depth, the world a sunken bed— any who needed air lay paralyzed in the logic of constellations. You found hollows, drowned places between tamaracks’ bleeding roots, in the acids of a bog’s throat. Names decayed in the knots of tubers, time’s reservoirs rotted to reptilian stillness. Once, you slipped through a door in a dead-water hump woven of finger bones stained tannic black— a dying animal’s breath rustled in root-hair and heavy fore claws clicked against the spine of the earth. All night while his children gnawed the shins of alders, plundered sticky muck, hissed and slapped at a gibbous moon’s fat rising, you felt your way into his drowned house, inching further into his dream, not afraid of waking such blind, furious hunger.