percussion percussion

percussion percussion

if echoes were touch they would be

a too early garbage

truck whose back-up

lights slide up the ceiling

and the warning

noises of reverse become a hospital

concert competing for all the other

street sounds

we trade in and carry up and down

endlessly inside our flights

of stairs

in our brain like bricks like cedar shingles

like slate making itself into

slate and making itself into

every place we want to stay either briefly

or for a long long forever long time

at ease or in our snaking aches

that claim and reclaim

that summit without us (though

its our own body and we carry ourself

and ourselves like take take-away

these days because that's what's gone

and is remarkably simple: a single

one finger digit you choose 

your favorite and your favor

and one wrist or one lip to lift to the collarbone

unzip with permission without permitting again you

choose the whole throat exposed

oh 

and consider this:  its only half a touch

if there's no groan no low moan

that opens those lonely homes where a she

a she a he a they sit alone unclothed and only a radio

and only the snow and only they are told

how slow it's all going 

to go like a stone on furlough forever forever from

the tone of throats hoping that the only

grief stationed there will stay at least until 

the wind at least until the next stone usurping

until listen to it fall that noise

between top and bottom like reach like see

Keats and his Grecian Urn believe me we see we see

but do we see because touch is as much

an utterance its this that lifts

the lips from the skin that insists the hips

and the wrists are instant and in

we've become this haven't we: museum pieces

reaching for museum and even in reaching

we are receding and sweetly easing 

into alarm