Hands
We weave our fingers together before we fall to sleep
and I notice yours, nearly slender, your infancy thinning.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////I did not notice the shape of those hands
————————————/////////–that gave you to me, that still hold so much of your story.
Your life line, your love line, both too small for me to get
a good read in fading November light.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////It is the back of my own that concerns me—now
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////more my mother’s, her mother’s.
You tap my palm in drowsy patty cake—mark it
with a G!
/////////////////////////////////////////////You will have no memory of what yours will become.
Connective Tissue
I might be smothered by
////////////////////////////////the love she causes.
Mornings I struggle out from under, our heavy sleep
breaths pull it down, down, and down overnight.…
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My mother is afraid for me, but my stepfather says, “If he wants to go, let him.”
So I’m on the plane alone. A stewardess with white skin and orange hair keeps leaning around her work station to smile and wink at me.
The man in the middle seat has gas and smells bad, like cow manure. He wears a smudged ring and I wonder if he’s someone’s father.
Where I’m flying to is flat farmland. Acres of wheat. Tractors and combines. In the winter the snows get so deep that locals drive snowmobiles on the streets instead of cars. I’ve never been, but I know because my blood father wrote me long letters that I’d find torn up in my parent’s trash.
When I tell the stewardess I’ll be nine in June, her smile lifts like it’s a hard trick she’s doing.…
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They called it something brand new.
Said it surpassed hard candy, snuff flicks,
or huffing Jefferson airplane glue. Pink
lemonade, a chaser: “It gives you a nice blank
feeling,” said the bleach blonde on QVC, quite
unlike snack cracker, creme filling or Mars
bar, clumps of wet sand squeezing through
the sun burned toes, erosion on the banks
of hometown rivers; they called it something
almost (not quite) Frank O’Hara with no sweat
in white linen suit, buzz cut and serendipity, ripping up
Lotto tickets on the sidewalk because there’s nothing
else to do. “But only the fact, that there’s nothing else
to do,” they made Frank say it “nothing
else to do.”
In a moment some cube of lemon light went
down, on cue, dappling the basement floor, about four
by eight inches fugitive from dirty casement window to
concrete; it was like that, and nothing more, although
they swore up and down it was so original, nobody
had ever seen it before; not in the purest torpor of three
thirty death in the afternoon, nor bubbly gin fizz
as bas relief etched out of pores, when you
know it in your funny bone, they said sit up
ram straight as a biker passing through, they
swore under a ton of sun, it was a new thing, a new
thing too precious to waste, or hesitate; I bought it
for awhile felt quite silken, as folds of alien skin.…
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The Meaning of More
We stack glass jars in the hallway,
fill them with fireflies and nails.
From the bed, we discover
walls move like water.
The blanket is a psychic’s tongue
draped across our legs.
What is more but what we can’t
really touch, your body sliding
down the shower wall,
where you end up when you
are gone. Spaces left
unstirred down my back.
You can bury me in your mattress
and dig me out later in loose threads
unstitching music notes,
the cigarette-glow
of need. We are objects
just like the things we keep
stored in attics and boxes,
these lonely trinkets, bed sheets.
Keep the pillows from long ago,
your lovers’ names sketched
inside each one, languages
of dead petals, wild pearls.…
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I
The sun
cracked your blinds
in my absence
like a pistol shot
and light showered your shadow
with curses
no different than my coming.
In both our parting,
in our irretrievable going,
my sun sits, fraternal, impassive,
impaling all life
like my love,
on a tree cracked with ribs.
In this way, commissar, we
return our losses to the great void.
We, of all who are
all faceless in our unnaming,
a people of wind and air.
In this i make sense of
the tv and
the newspapers depart
disposable in our forgetting.
In this way my excesses are forgiven
and history buries the dead with the binding
of our tongues!
In all our melting absences
i have nailed this history to
the forest of our delusions.…
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There is nothing unusual about how we go at it. I’m up first. My morning cigarette. Up and turn the heater on. I hate the cold throughout the night. I hate sleeping in long sleeved shirts and trousers, but we cannot afford to run the machine for too long. I can stand winters here, though. They’re short. Quite. Then I’m back in bed, body cold from the air outside on the balcony. We don’t have an alarm. I just wake up. Sometimes she’s up in the middle of the night. Sometimes I am. A few times. Neither one of us can sleep properly. She’ll go read in the other room. I’ll just lay there on my back running conversations with deceased friends or family. Talking in fragments.…
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