Cento (Disarticulated)

I would like to call across the river.
And how should I begin?
Every morning I forget how it is
when I am sitting at the window
surprised at the earth. 
Piece by piece I seem 
scattered on mountains fifty miles away
just as the burning house
among twenty snowy mountains.


When it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
everyone in me is a bird.
I am what is missing.
These are the moments, if ever, an angel steps
into the mind.  And the angel wants to go back
and fix things, to repair the things that have been broken.
This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
everything only connected by "and" and "and":
mutter we all must as well as we can.

Shannon Holman, New York, 2000