Serenade / A Constellation in Training

/ every night you tell me the stars
are missing teeth from all the bar fights
in America / that what has always been

shifting over my foundation is the silent fire
of every unknown we could suffer / scattered
like salt on a sky as tender and open

as a wound / each one / a distant city
simmering in its own exhaust / is untethered /
ignorant until we frame it / until we lace a grid 

of buried bones between them into unseen
highways / a net swollen with blackfish /
eyes stiff / and teeming / 

                                         every night

we watch whole valleys drape with fatigue /
the little lights sprinkle on knowingly / cars
trailing red ribbons / hot flares and rose petals /

old standards to ring in the end / or beginning /
of another war / look around / you tell me /
things live longer when they are given a name 

and a reckoning / why we are allowed
to make believe these quiet storms are now
names / strewn and burning over the old 

where they lay in kindling of lost propositions /
hard eyes made of wanting populate our nights
and times / chiseled in obsidian that shatters

when desire and rage / faultline  

                                                    the skin

of every gentle face / every land / every
body made a light / by such friction /