Form of Recollection

It has something to do with the time of day, evening,
what we call dusk, but I call blue time.

I watch anglerfish—they below who crease sidewalks,
cigarette embers leading them toe-tap to toe-tap,
anonymous night sounds mark
Fibonacci sequences of a city.
The thrall of orange edging out/invasion of cobalt shard
settles on our uneven planes,
up the brick ripple of Saginaw St.,
down the urchin spines of Woodward Ave.,
through the lit aquaria of half-basement apartment—
into the flint spark/revelation of a tide pool:
a handful of broken granite, a loose brick, saplings grown from
between cracks, empty 5 a.m. parking lots, beams embossed like
sheet metal come from the moon and make a ghost ship tableau.
My chest is an ocean floor for these things collecting.

I’ve bathed well in the glow of tourmaline love,
jewels dropped down to sink and light the way,
I’ve learned how to wring night air into a tall glass
for a toast.

It has something to do with sweating on your sheets
around midnight,
a muslin layer of wax on the skin
catching a glint from skyward artifacts;
the vertebrae of Ursa Major aligned point north—
a brown bear in a tributary who claws gleaming trout
from under my sunken trees and river stone,
Aquila skims me trying to attract my creatures
to the surface—I blow a puff of smoke into his feathers
and watch him retreat into mercurial tint of insomnia.

I keep a snapshot of you hidden like treasure.
You, at the mouth of a cavern
gasp of light which makes you only a
dim shape/dark contrast/ those nights
we stood on our ghost ship/and called our city Atlantis—

It’s vertigo from the sloping roof of timeline, a barracuda
fixated on the horizon glint, my high tide,
the blue time.