In free countries every word is inflamed with flowers.
There are always funerals to attend.
That Soviets sent atheists to die in space
only evidences the premise that an ache is sovereign in humans.
(Collectively, we've done all the drugs in the catalog,
worked to exile ourselves from the pull of suns
curving around rooms, bent like trees in the soft algae radiation)
Who entered who is irrelevant in the procession of things,
but important to nation building.
People often leave each other with the windows set like clocks
to bloom at the insurgence of a feral moon.
They call the silence an animal,
a painting of wooden boats lined across the strait.
And people used to cross there, I say,
smoking with strangers in a bright field.
This morning, another nuclear physicist died.
We begin to question the notion of accidents.
And then the gravity and harmonicas;
woman smiles down the wall.
When news comes from the past I remember you were beautiful.
Dried-up river: Tell me you've been loved before,
there is so much time left on the planets that occupy me,
but it's always the wrong kind.