Collaboration with the night I lay
my head on your corduroy waiting
for the subway, sleep a soothing snake
in my ear, the other face of death
pushing their mop along, nodding at you
Collaboration with the morning air
not brushed by passing limbs nor warmed
by rushing lungs, some time still wrapped
in its ribbons, some sun still cold
enough to stare at
Collaboration with the grass growing beneath
our bedsheet, a green cave fit for snoring bugs,
a crevice narrowing with the tectonic shift,
we are given a name there
and it sticks
Collaboration with the horizontal evening light
and the leaves backlit therein,
there, in the momentary confidence of trees,
following your hushed welcome into
a lush and barricaded happiness
Collaboration with the blue mountains unseen
behind fog, the trees I had driven between
over so many years, so unlike your black forest,
the fragile smiles granted to me
that wilt in your world-weary gaze
Collaboration with the deer grazing
on the golf courses of the setting sun,
beside the unmarked graves of the young that mark
this land and its age, those deer like dozens of gods
who leant their bodies on the highway’s shoulders
