L i n d s e y W e b b —

Long Lost

the bike shack in rubber

like a woman in fur

he brings me a tire to smell

brake pads hammers

I didn’t know what not to say

so I didn’t say it all

and went to bed

a fog about my knees

blue hammers at midnight

it comes from being unprepared

for the fire in an iris

it cleans the dawn

preserving its colors

while leaving a hole at the center

the pupil intact

strange thing to say

“not long lost”— I

thought the quick route

to the truth was through

the hole in the obvious

preserved bird song

goldfinch road

runner hummer

but I’m simply trying

to come to an agreement

with myself

about the past

while the velvet padding

at the base of the piano

hammers

compresses with each impact

unevenly red green

or both

strange all these sounds

long ago I lost

and believed the very sun

would stop

and go on stopping

Cretaceous Ash Disaster

with a line from Brian Dillon

in the undifferentiated sagebrush steppe all my categories sift

even electricity through their mesh

under a slab of thunder white and solid as a fat cap

i step through strands of butterfly mosquito wasp the grasshopper

gathering and dispersing over my head waves clusters and hollow

volumes it takes great effort

to live among the big list the insects and i

with no first or last place

sweet to sleep to stop for the valley to go on sinking

a little further every decade

the fossil record broken dumped and scattered the first shark

older than the rings of saturn

the list always leaves something to be invented or recalled

backbone pressed nightly underground against a femur

something forgotten limp pink spider in a silk globe tacked

to a curtain in the moment of its making

molecules cluster solidify warp dissolve

and scatter little endless legs a long dead net

.