Broadcasting

for Robert Dunn

When that cold enters the room again,
stupefied, half-consumed with blue—
an intruder that has come to be all
too familiar with the layout of our brains,
we can only wonder who has sent it
and why its odor is that of a cave’s,
its speech so much older than syllable, tense
and why we’ll soon arise and cloud the window
with inference but resist drawing that childish glyph

coughing instead and resting our heads,
turning back once again to where our bodies
had curled, questioning, on the unmade bed,
our memories awash with the slumberous red of the sun;
memo: a light not convinced of itself and saying little
of the light that has been and the light yet to come
or the god on the sill freshly shaved, in borrowed shoes
whose message we’ll always miss as we think
about bliss then look down at what we’ve written about it

though considering how the hours grow horns,
its laughter piped in through a century’s wires
it’s probably best we’re resigned to that spot on the glass
where we’ll have reigned like a giant’s fist or a nova
and through which we’re now zeroing in on this crow
we’d known first by its chuckling, crow-squawks
and then by how we saw every crow that was
ever created superimposed onto this crow—
testing, check one, and then that crow, check two.