What I am saying is that my mind is eucalyptus

trees on a beach while I am sleeping through

another life. When I wake up crying invisible tears

I can tell you there are children in them. I know

this sounds sentimental, but frilly pink frosting on a cake

is still part of the cake. These kinds of tears  

come from an umbilical pool of silver cords,

the genesis of my gut’s gut, and all of those moods

that cannot be described well, except by accident.

Like when I was too high to drive home

and had to lie in the dark with a friend sometimes

lover who I didn’t know so well anymore,

and I said that I felt like black feathers in my mouth. Oh, when

a breast swelling with love was the bona fide skin of it,

an arrowed intent true as a piece of whitened glass

in the sand at Cannon, curved like the lip of a teacup,

pure because the glass is made that way by a mindless thing,

no deliberation, no caution, no regret, but rather

intuition beading on an endless string

passing through all time, by a sea that moves

and moves things, changes, it does what it does

until it does what it does forever. I like the feeling

of a laborious job that results in a small but useful thing.

Turning cream into butter or carving a shape into wood,

the mind goes then, it goes away.

My father has a good story about an old beekeeper,

but my father has died and I can’t remember

all of the beautiful details about how the bees

disappeared. Someday I will make up the rest

and we will fit into that honey-colored afternoon

when the bees mourned in their own way

and then dying will be just another season of weather

we haven’t dreamed of yet. I have endlessness inside

of me, the kind of limitlessness that comes from knowing

where the limits want to be. When I sleep I meet my other selves

and we bawl in each others’ arms because this is almost over

and it goes so fast and a thread of honeysuckle in my mouth

at recess is all of it. When you say that it is my name

I will hear on the wind, carried away from all this,

the last word from your last breath, your last mouth,

I will believe you and wish that I was from another time,

snug tight in a calico dress mending the collar

of your favorite checkered work shirt by candlelight,

humming the war trumpets to sleep and wondering  

why the wind at the door sounds so familiar.