for Russ Banks 

The ear threading
the eye

all night long
the ear
on a long errand
for the eye

through the thickening
pine
white birch
over no-man’s-land

pebbles
is it
compact in their anonymity
their gravity

accidents of location
abstract necessity

water
which takes such pains

to convince me 
it is flowing

*

Summoning me
to be
two places at once

to drift
the length
of its chill
its ache

hand white
at the knuckles

live bait
the old hide-and-seek
in and out
of the swirl

luminous verb
carnivorous verb
innocent as sand
under its blows

*

An insomnia as big
as the stars’

always 
on the brink—
as it were
of some deeper utterance

some harsher 
reckoning

at daybreak
lightly
oh so lightly
when she brushes
against me

and the hems of her long skirt
go trailing

a bit longer 

*

Nothing
that comes to nothing
for company

comes the way a hurt
the way a thought
comes

comes and keeps coming

all night meditating
on what she asks of me
when she doesn’t

when I hear myself say
she doesn’t