Where has all the gone
Siphoned from your banks to trim with valuation

Oh be back when the lights come on
As when you skated thoughtless

Limbs extending urethane
A milky flaxen clicking through
Blocks of sandy walking stone

Viewed back close the work collapses
Within earshot looping nursery voice recorded

Not for nothing not for not or
What the
What the what

Feeling this must mean or should be meant
The view acquires high maroon

Years of lecture conversation stanzas washing hands
Church and school and stores and rooms
A culminating waste

The roof
Is getting hammered
Someone hammering the roof 

With grails shook from grails shaking  
In whose grip the air shakes

The tracker not returned with any game
Even when returned with
Clean kills cleaned

Dead-end mint and lavender exuberant
Hushing of metal

Growing there you must have loved to
Must have loved you guess

An altar vessel
Lipped with blur of missing wine
Hoary drip of honey squandered like

The restlessness of hands
Squandered on
Accomplishment

Like bundled lavender
Thrown from distance to the flaming barrel

Arc of raining lavender
Your face as livid as the sky

Capable of night no more

—

Petro Moysaenko holds degrees from NYU and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems appear in Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Prelude, and other publications. He lives in New York City and coedits the online journal Paperbag.