when the line breaks

We believe in the power of gravity: weight is worth.

—Kay Ryan, from her essay “Notes on the Dangers of Notebooks”

*

What calls me this morning is dark matter.

It proves its own existence by showing up.

**

Interred is in the news, again.

Transitive, it needs an object to be understood.

***

In a land of myth, timelessness marks its specifics:

• • • There were no people here before us.
    • We made this place useful.
    • Our destiny is unbought.
    • You belong here.

****

This place is measured by its sunlit hours.
Warm colors seem closer to the observer.

Apologies are evidence: absent presence.

*****

The sky is percussive.

Rain falls in delight.

******

There are exactly ten Sundays left this year.

Is this concession, a thing conceded,
or translation of a revengeful confession?

The point is to be inside entropy, a sense of border and calculation.
Not quite religion and the opposite of science, something more
like keeping time and understanding place as landscape, salt, and glare
of light regardless of season. It is the sound just beneath
your most emphasized words that hums a necessary undoing.

*******

Topographically speaking, a saddle is the gap between two peaks.

Offset, understood in this way, is why distance is a hungry ghost.

Kiss the back of my knees like a desperate symptom of anger as luxury,
as a transitive verb and an exercise in yielding when the line breaks.