after all this

moon, after all this hyped light

you fall through like a dead bird's

 choreography that’s Einstein

precise, that when replayed

in a southern eclipse can only be

glimpsed through a palisade of eye-

lash, an almost entire barricade.

But I can’t unsee you, even

after all these years of cloister,

  of haze and cloud and shade.  Maybe

that one sight of you so close

was just enough

to undo me completely

like the picked fruit’s stem-end

seen through the first woman’s lens,

sclera white with a light

  that floods wild with want,

and blots out all light, interred

for as long as it takes to wick a wide night

toward the iris, a hybrid fall,

whose renewed cornea it all skidded

across like, what?   a bit skin 

and then an abrupt end

—swollen, clothed for days until

but brief, brief scant of light…

Even with all of that

this is I want

to be:  

my tongue alive inside mutual

skin. I want to speak it into my heart

and weigh it against

a feather, and even after all

that desire, still have my sins be few.

 moon, I am the perching bird who’s lost

her grip and falls, claws clenched

 with air.  I'll go down

like you do, like Eve does: as through

a coiled telescope,

  in arrant clarity, who, when struck,

lets it all drop.

And when it cracks on impact, somehow 

clearer behind your light, it will be a live

breast, a prism of eruptive need

wind lifting up

the layered shirt while

  your descent, complete for a breath, eclipses

  us all, eye to eye,  as if it happens

like this every single day,

as charged as Eve’s need to know,

saying yes, of course, it has to be,

precisely,

this.