An Explanation of Mag-Big, Second Attempt:

1. Splendor in the yellow sweet
dripping peach. Perfect, momentary.
Soil down, and up
white silhouettes—bugs through beams.

2. Whispering, “please, oh please” to air
or something fear cannot unbind
and if it hears a desperate plea, it is listening.

3. Intoxication because in the moments before
hitting the water
Icarus smiles at the sun.

4. Animal love.

5. The song that understands and how it seduces
over and over
until it is a lover we cannot be with
any longer.

6. A lighthouse casting a shivering slice
through undulating fog;
the mariner catching it in a glass sphere.

7. Pages and pages of crumbling yellowed words
my grandmother at eighteen
believes in crackling radio broadcasts.

8. The lover, how he stretches, and in his slumber
rests his hand upon the breast.
Now becomes tempered by certain impermanence.
Still, his dreams are a Grecian urn preserving her.

9. When dying words are unselfish,
such as,
“try to be happy,” or “smile, my love.”

10. When trees creak
like whale songs,
it becomes certain that without ears
the forest is still a symphony.

11. Awaking to snow
how it covers churning streets with impenetrable silence
and we play, for the first time in years.

12. The painter, how he cannot stop
with birds and feathers
plumage plucked from the wing of an osprey.
He considers himself from birds eye view.

The Adulteress

She has learned how to
endlessly wait
drawing his presence
from residuals
in linen, buried secrets.

She loafs and answers
and by her own suggestion
doesn't ask.

She is unconditioned
and admires intoxication, how
we free ourselves
in me minutes before we fall.