A skeleton swings—

from a tree like laundry on fishing line, false horizon
so invisible, it can only belong to phantoms. I’ve held out
for the dead each year to become less dead. What axis
would the earth have if love was an unkillable

art? I’ve never wanted fortune or its friends. Just time
to not be a woman dressed in a copper cage searching
for perfect swans. It never does last. I find
wasps disguised as angels—no one is making honey.

It was a clefted apple with worms’ cursive into
fruit soft as sky. Unavailing and alluring
as holding a child that is not yours,
imagining an alternative name— a deliberate process

for nothing. Still, I check the rearview mirror. I do
idle choreography around yard sales. I hold relics
as if they are hands, yet hesitate because they might have been
warmed between someone else’s thighs. What we find in love

we write in yellow. In a dream I had your hands; I knew
carpentry. I understood how to whittle the sun into a pastel. Line by line
I composed color theory as admissions of love
I’ve never possessed. In another dream about birth—

I wasn’t an agile Venus. All of earth was without
virtue. Softened to dustbloom from rising

sea tides and sour experimentations; I’ve told no one.