Hugh Steinberg's poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Crowd, VeRT, Volt, Spork and Fence.  He teaches in the writing program at California College of the Arts and is the editor of  Freehand, a journal devoted to handwritten work.






Perhaps by being called, we kept arriving.
We were written instead of filmed.  The writing

trails upward, resembles lovers in their
entanglements, whole paragraphs of you.

When stuck, you should write about the
moon.  I don’t need to be chosen I was

never separate from you.






***






It’s said cranes need lots of room.  How
do they exist so far apart and stay together?

I couldn’t stand it, to not be able to see
your body, to not be part of you out of

some genetic modesty.  I have trouble
staying asleep without you.  I belong to

another world. 

Over hundreds of years, stone and soil
organize themselves into patterns,

or lifted, lifting.  Sure.  The visible, the shine
of it is green and its own kind of knowing.

My other face, maybe I was a man inside
of myself, I didn’t just find myself beside

you.  Conversant, as birds here do.






***






Approached then loitered some around.
Botanied the self and all its horticultures.

Weedily, strewn lands, folds and more.
A body belonging to another body who

uses it carefully to break all kinds of codes.
And to stroll with, about outside on walks.

Snails, small birds, raccoons, argentine ants.

Revelations!  The wild snorts angels make!
You’ll never step on the ground again!

The name, it is so literal, the shadow has
six spokes, the arms they are so radiant

you’ll never walk in this country again!
You’ll lie down in iris petals!  Wheels vs.

spheres!  Defending the world from the world.






***






What brings us?  What air, pearls?
Under pale rain, root puller, weightlessness.

Soaked, so didn’t break.  It was pearled,
also winged, and I could wait for hours.

Enveloped in it.  Only finally, luminously, in-
sist upon an unfolding.  Roses.  This scattered

ground of cloverflowers, bundled tight.

Weak from sleeping without you, my
arrival is bonewhite and welcomed by

the patriarchs, for they have been hunted, they
don’t remember where the money went,

the silt in the causeway was unintended,
and the night air, the poor, it’s true I thought,

blown and released, I didn’t stop for them.






***






What causes persons to become people?
to lie flat and then stick up?  There was

a trap but we avoided it.  There were favorites
we avoided them too.  The animal shadow of course

the promise you grow into, of course.  To hide
in the dark.  I leave something in myself, I

got younger just thinking about it!

I live in a water house; it will not evaporate.
Slanting, I know what I’m made of.  I can

pivot here.  I can walk sideways, I can
swim some.  That’s my breath inside

my mouth.  Some glass, windows, glasses,
some spirals, intervals, cells.  There is

another kind of drinking.  Wise space.






***






Binding objects with their names, with what
they’re about.  To say unhinged would be to

imply there used to be a door.  So.  There was
a roof and a door.  To forget what you know

about your body.  To weave a garden into you.
There’s so much sky wanting in, it is to praise

the infinite that moves, is moving through us.