The Location of the World

I think that in the interstices
of my sobriety, an expanse
like a humid night with lightning
or a dry poisoned ground or a concrete wall
and its veins of narrow cracks,
I am almost insane. And that madness
is a cool summer rarely recalled
or a cool episode of an unbearable summer, one night
where the light of the west delayed under the oaks
and spread through your hair and eyes and around your temples,
not wanting to descend from there
even into the valley of the moon
and its transformations. A time, a flower
too tiny to be known to anyone—
when I ask its name, there’s a blank
silence and I too forget I ever had it
in my eyes, almost my hands,
growing from the rare fissures.