2 Poems from Nthposition

You, with Others

You are 600 years of smoke columns
twisting into shapes over an open field.
Your skin is an approximation only.
You search incessantly through a box of screws
but have no image of what you want to find.

An attendant speaks but your clawing
drowns him out like the grinding of a transmission.
He touches a palm to your shoulder
in some form of affection and you manage
to mumble back words like one-inch metal cylinders.

You leave them as a gift, son to father,
and they turn to smoke in his hands.

You become a wooden ladder,
a checkered tablecloth,
a crack in porcelain.

You write letters to your selves
and leave them in places
you wouldn’t think to look.

You take off the skin suit
and hang it from a hook in the mantle
through the left nostril
where smoke still lingers.

In the Beginning

In the beginning,
eyes rolled forth from
electric sockets like boulders
down the ice face.

My uncle, centered in the iris,
threw a duck headlong into
the branches of a Japanese Maple.
These were the stars,
he said, and within his eyes,
electric sockets, flowing.