Five Poems

Before its first grave this hillside was already showing signs let its slope escape as darkness mistake every embrace for dirt though one arm more than the other is always heavier, still circles down bringing you closer the way rain knows winter will come with snow that was here before, bring you weights till nothing moves, not the shadows not the sun coming here to learn about the cold, hear the evenings.

Though you can’t tell them apart your tears came back, marked the ground the way leaves go unnamed to their death as the need to follow one another one breath at a time, face up and after that the rain and warmer — you weep with your collar open make room for another grave near a sea each night wider, further no longer heard the way now and then comes by to close the Earth with buttons and sleeves and tighter.

You open this jar the way each raindrop breaks apart midair, stops telling time when struck by another, head to head as streams — your hands stay wet let you gather the hours that are not the bottom stones mourners use for water though this lid is still circling where you listen for those nights on the way back as the puddles water makes when trying to breathe into a place on its own and empty-handed the glass shatters all at once.

And though the Earth lets you dig it’s your tears that heat the ground already growing stars once the darkness covers it to lure these dead here with stones scented with shorelines returned not as rain but grass just as it was, closing in from all sides the way this shovel is warmed by your hands kept wet, pulled closer — you cling to this dirt as if it once was an afternoon knows only the slow descent hand over hand into stone that no longer opens to hear the bleeding.

Leaning against the wall it becomes a death bed the way a name on paper flattens out to take hold for which there is no word only a room where no one noticed you didn’t ask for help so close to the corners with the light still on.