there’s blood in the water of my freedom

there’s blood in the water of my freedom
a wild, leaping freedom
that makes the skin crawl
and butchers the animals

my freedom falls fiery from the sky,
a disfiguring freedom
devouring the crops
taking the first born

freedom, i cannot look
upon your face

cover my eyes
for tomorrow the time will come
to borrow white garments
and dance in the vineyards
but tonight

tonight please hold me,
hold me in your darkness
so i can bury my dead.

to return

the metal sign wilts
tilts on its weary pole toward the river

                   long since faceless

        struck
mute by the elements to which it now
slowly bows

                   turning its back
to the rusty walkway over the tracks leading to
steps that crumble mid-
sky

         how does one descend
oneself when
devolution is not an option?

even the whales
         had to find a different way forward
to return.

inversion

certain hebrew letters
if inverted
can contain all that might have been
straining against their ink-stained limits
even as we create new languages
for the memory and erasure of dreams

arise

i watch from the jersey shoreline
as you swim out past the breakwater
until i can barely see you
a dot punctuating the horizon
period at the close of a watery run-on palindrome

and i want to call out to you
amidst the salty dance of distance and intimacy:
let us invert ourselves and hold all of this
let us point our feet at the sky
and feel the blood flow to our faces
like sand to the bottom of an hourglass

return

but you are no longer visible
and sometimes the world cannot be written
so i whisper a prayer of exile
as far off in the distance
something large and grey jumps up out of the ocean
and hovers for a moment between sky and water
before plunging back down under the surface
as though it had never been.