Your head unrocking to a pulse, already

Hollowed by air, posts a white paraphrase

Among bruised roses on a peppered wall.

—Hart Crane

This one was presented to me

while I was falling asleep:—veil of paraphrase

from the words you sent, from the perishing stanzas in the bed

to assume this air-appearance, bruised shadow

on the new white paper maché, simple sum

of both our verbal traits.

I was speaking from the mask

with the tongue of pearls:

    my breath softened this compromise

and the edges of the mask.

I wore all the extravagance of lost syllables: androgynous lethologica.

I was sleeping on paper.

I was speaking from the tapestried books of Eros, speaking

to your wrists. It was the pulse

of dying bees, pale in a bowl

carried across a dry field.

The sky was a blank page of the mask.

Bees: this terrifying

devotion to language.