Where would I go
The sky is everywhere
at once like a big movie
and though I think I know how
it’s going to end
and with which music
there is uncertainty enough
to hold me still
It’s an Empire Out There
I saw you walk
past the window box
and brush against
one flower
I saw you
readjust your jacket
saw you kiss
Long live
whatever needs our dying
Whatever feeds us
and then
tells us don’t exist
Elegy for Neil Armstrong
And This Too Comes Apart
People agree with sleep
They nod into it
but death they sometimes fight off
until they can’t
and then
from their graves
they stick out their tongues
Good for them
Good for the people
In the world I can see
there is one tree still raining
The sun blares around
lights it up
in lines alongside the spiders’
They have an arrangement
a private design
When I’m arranged
into a mother
I will name my child
Incredulity and like it so much
I’ll do it again
three or four
or eight times
Stand up!
Good and straight like a tree
good and stiff like
the rain-darkened gravestone
perpendicular
to the quiet
Or sit down
and make a nice lap
nod Incredulity off into sleep
Enumerate to her the lines
of the song you haven’t meant yet
Hatch
In every place
you seem to end
I have loved you
There was that small
and dead and pink
bird we saw
near the sidewalk
with its smashed
open mouth
a place to let
the world in
a way of not ending
I loved you so
I had to crawl inside
Such and Such a Time at Such and Such a Palace
The lack of a single-word infinitive
in our language is what is killing me
this morning
A single word for all
infinitives is what God is doing tonight
This is just one of many acts
to have passed through the garden
Previously on this show they put
a peacock back together wrong
after its demise
Something
there was in the syntax
Poor bird could feel it in his bones
Me and My Head as Pieces of Wood
Please accept my uselessness
as a token of other letters
abacus
spells an occasional
way to be feeling
There are limits
These are
my limitations
I spin around I can’t
slide back to then
Flowers Are Also Letters
Imagine eating
in one bite
a rose
or
imagine eating
gold
manger de l’or
Do I?
Do I ever!
Oe!
Oi!
Oeieio!
Nature Poem
Yesterday it was marsh marigolds
by the river with my mother
and in the afternoon forsythia
with Chris
(he dislikes it)
and today it is grass again
with ants departing
or heading
toward each other to exchange
an urgent message
Church bells
are literally ringing and then
oh my god the train
and jesus christ a butterfly
lovely brown with off-white tips
and every now and then irregular
lavender spots
It’s not necessary
to write everything down
When a creature quietly tends
to itself
I am happy
and by extension earlier I thought
for actually a very long time
about ants and the impossibility
of ant masturbation
They do not love themselves enough
They only love each other
They Are Leaving You a Message
▪ for Arda Collins
What they are trying to tell you
is you are wearing the wrong bra
for your shape and situation
This might not even be your life
and in the midst of my thinking
to tell you this a fruit fly
has begun to trail me through the house
as if I were its mother or as if
it were the other way around
and it always is and the house
is on fire at some point
in the simultaneity and I am leaving it
to buy all the things I do
and do not devour
Drapes
They were erecting a conversation
in the middle of the inconsequential
afternoon
like one of those unnatural flowers
you drop into water and watch
immediately blossom
And then then what
Has anything changed?
They were emigrating from one wall
to the other
like swans of
ungodly proportions
They were not so much
humans as blood drenched with hair
Uncloudy
Sitting in the tower munching clover
with no roof
with encircled sky
a dark hole the quick stars infest
I need these stones to quiet me down
I need the quiet so nouns can collect
The clover’s a pulp
as if I’m making paper
lifting up linen strips from who else
but the dead
And never has this star clutch
been so silent
Forever have I darkly thee undressed
Not Much More Room in the Cemetery
I will lie down on top of the graves
It will never feel okay and that is the point
People beneath and people behind me
with their faces and their little horns
and the places from which they are shining
I know there is something else
that they have tried to teach me
and I am sorry for all of the times
I have listened and not learned it
No I am not crying
I’m maybe um a demon
For certain I am waving this fruit fly away
As If No Light Could Warm You
A person in
a nice dress
She moves
into the shape
the sun makes
on the floor
A nice dress
& it clamors
A voice says
I can take it
She says I
take it back
How Long Is the Heliopause
They say before you know you want
to move your hand
your hand
is already about to move
They say in advance
these things
are decided
The box of cereal says We’re so happy
our paths have crossed
but I do not think
I am on one
I think I am in
a pathless field
The wind sends seeds abroad
The most careful engineering
Still these contrary gardens grow
They say it is hard to believe
that when robots are taking pictures
of Titan’s orange ethane lakes
poets still insist on writing about their divorces
This is a poem for my husband
on the occasion of Voyager
perhaps having left our solar system
perhaps about to leave it very soon
They cannot say
The message takes so long to drift to reach us
When the self-driving car wants to move
it will first say so
changing lanes
changing lanes
changing lanes
It hesitates it does not know it is lost
or it has decided on always changing
I’ve heard the cat who may be alive
or may be dead should expect
to live forever
progressively growing
sicker and sicker
This is for my husband
whom I expect to come home
some time between now and the future
Let me date this very clearly
This is the year after the year
when people with cable began
to pile Christmas lights into glass jars
the year of evidence of chemical warfare
clear or uncertain
depending on where you live
One beast lives one grows sicker and sicker
One dies one yowls at the door
Two days from now I will either
bleed or not bleed
I will remember
that four years ago we wed and asked
for Divine Assistance
though we neither of us
pray to any god
This is for him on the occasion
of the Olympian’s indictment
They say he shot
the one he loved
Shot the one
who through a door
he could not see
None of this has been right
but maybe a tiny electrical god
has cut and spliced us together
And in this moment yes and in this moment no
and in this moment all the lights
go off at once and it is a bomb
or it is a daughter
And this great sound replaces the others
so I can hear nothing but the brightness
of the field
where I am waiting for the warm chest
of my husband
for its occasion
and if they say a word now
it would take years for me to know
Some Glamorous Country
In the war’s geometry
among the many givens
the spaces of the torn
away limbs articulate
what
What are they
needed to prove
On the sidewalk
I’m watching a full-length
animation the trees made
w/technical direction
from the sun
We saw Batman at
a matinee because who
would bother to shoot
so few so early in the day
It is not that my life
has become interesting
to me
It is that
given the terrified world
how can I
& can I resist
the things I have done
in my name
In the Dumps
Just because we’ve broken my head
doesn’t mean we must glue it together
There’s other work to be done
and dark
grass freezing
There is some old light
to read by and large pink thumbs
And with my head apart
I think
the world can get in easy
This
pound of dirt I’m holding weighs a ton
Pursuits
It is not that you want
to be the one to make prints
in the untrampled snow
It is that you want
to be in the snow
without having touched it
to be of the snow
not beginning
Everywhere commerce
dictates the shapes
that move you along
that seat you at a table
far from the snow
far from the act
of not touching
It only gets worse
A girl’s gotta eat
And your hunger’s
not even your own
Aesthetics of Crying
You meet someone and later you meet
their dancing
and you have to start again
You like cat one
and you like cat two
and they do terrible things to each other
Once to celebrate a bad mood
we broke all the clean dishes
There are pictures
I’d like a portrait
of an angry horse with his beauty
and his fuming
It’s hard to know
what you look like when you’re mad
Crying’s easier
I have cried at times
for so long that I have moved the activity
in front of the mirror
out of curiosity
The information I gathered there remains
thus far unused
but let the record show
my horrible face
Keep in Shape
I only think the snow regards me
It falls where I stand
It doesn’t stay in place when I
walk on
They say Jesus wrote
a little in some dirt that
blew away
They say a man
can piss a short name
in the snow
Nice work
See me after class
See how
the weather does not write me
never phones
I can’t pretend
that doesn’t hurt
but I can
pretend I’m burning down my home
Optioned
Of my days I’m director
not author
and neither of us has
any money
I was born with a wooden spoon
in my ass
Imagine my embarrassment!
Then go ahead and imagine your own
What does a house do?
That’s easy
It houses
just as a cloud
pulls the light from a face
when someone utters mortgage
In any other world
a sweet name
for a daughter
beginning as it does
with a little death
Annual
The sky lifted from black into paleness
while gloom rocked the markets
gently
a terrifying dad
I had intended to have flowers
delivered
It was a condition
I’d suffered before
On the back road
you remarked upon the width
of the stone wall and everyone nodded
walked slowly away
Our lives are I think
coming apart
There were clouds
we could see but not say
Ecumene
We are where we are bound for
where life is still motion and we
have seen a rabbit seen a river
seen the rope
Two times we slept
in Virginia when mountains gathered
themselves for the light
It was pink and then darker
into a lilac no trouble to like
All of the time now we have to imagine
the children of our friends
Impossible people
how they go on and how other
times they end by these trees and
oh by their shadows
the dark uncovered places
of now becoming a then
Dear Seth
▪ for Seth Landman
Dear Seth
You have been disappointed
in love and I am sorry
that to hope
for and to imagine love is to possess it
however briefly
so that when the picture
does not come clear one experiences
not only sadness but loss
We had an appointment
These dumb risks of ours these dumb arms
How aversion is the urge to look away
I know the general uselessness
of looking to words for answers
but on occasion
the cast spell works
so we still mutter
what we can
We stutter Try
Dear Seth
It’s snowing again lightly in Ohio
like it had an idea and thought
There’s no harm
in trying it out
before growing distracted
by some town I cannot see
For you in Massachusetts I hope
for enough weather
that the office gives up
and tells you to stay home
Do you remember the day we drove
out to the gorge?
I could not see
the difference between the pale sky
and the ground
like the snow
had erased the whole horizon
It was a good day and I miss you
I hope you are well
Dear Seth
There is fear the baby
when it arrives will be wrongly
or poorly loved
that the world is no place
for helpless things
You will see
reading this through your good beard
how neatly