Was the time I believed a tree
the proper home for my lust + hope, not time
but era maybe, epoch, spell
of years in which I’d at night climb into limbs which overlooked
a baseball field I never played on as a kid
+ wonder what would happen next
while the stars mapped the nothingness above. I’d never
seen a woman’s nipple, never worn
like the perfect overcoat someone else’s hand
on my penis, there is exposed
like streaker at ballgame + exposed
like shuddering wracks that follow what you’re
thinking now. You too
had a first, a ballfield whose bases at night
you wondered how you’d get to, with
whom, what team, tell me your tree and I’ll
whisper mine, the rec rooms + basements,
braced-teeth gnashings toward sweetness + not knowing
where to put hands or penis or honesty. Did you too
learn to lie in this way? To say that felt amazing
though it didn’t, though it felt better than anything
that’d come before? The sudden discovery
of insufficiency, learning hunger while devouring
perfect fruit. Learning on microfiber sofas and in
deep hushes that each sensation was sliver,
jagged fragment, slip
of paper loosed from larger volume of the raw
earth’s manual, each amazement a single page, how ig-
neous rock forms, the difference between magnetic
and true north, salinity shifts from sea to ocean, the
88 inches of red stitching that make a baseball then
sudden clarity like a bat splintering on contact, how history is
the cover coming off, ball trailing yarn
as it hurtles toward the fence and the way    after
post-knowing    post-touch    the stars above
blinked like a billion asterisks guiding the reader’s eye
back    to the smaller text below.