This same screech owl
was trilling at 4:00 p.m.
from across the field.
Water from the tap —
it’s still moving when I drink it.
I trembled like that once, too,
after days without sleep.
I felt invincible.
Gray fur spreads
through the coffee grounds.
I’m bleary-eyed again.
Underneath the spoon’s
small lake of chowder
she fears her face
is still staring back,
upside-down, like
some girl in China,
& depending on the angle,
either outlandishly skinny
or outlandishly fat.
She shuts her eyes
& quickly shoves it in.
“Delicious, isn’t it?”
her mother smiles
from the other side of
their round, round table.
Out there, where the cold
gives your lungs a taste of sky,
a whole canon might be had
for a fraction of the cost
of these gothic letters
on a desert-pale parchment.
Life sentences.
Stones burning holes
up through the snow.
We walk arm in arm
on the sunset strip,
red at night like a plush coffin lid,
like a cartoon heart used as a glyph
to stand in for that dread word
as I bend over you in my blazer
& count to ten.
The only hunger that matters now
can hide in a silk handkerchief
& reappear in a deck of cards:
club, diamond, spade.
You learn to dig.
I took my bearings from
a tattered map taped to a lamppost
turned left at the inside-out umbrella
propped against a dumpster
& continued straight past
the strip malls
& the self-storage units
until I reached open ground
contoured with corn stubble
a crow on pond ice
the blue trees of distance
I walked into the wind
sleet stinging my face
& shook my head at every driver
who pulled alongside & gestured to get in
this was where I’d been going
Two garden seats, side by side:
one is full of leaves & the other, twigs.
It looks like an amicable division.
A spam comment touts Extraordinarily naked people.
I hear a train whistle & remember
the beast that stalked me in all
my childhood dreams.
Up in the attic, a freshly shed snake skin
is stretched across the pink fiberglass.
Such separations must be wrenching, however necessary.
A bluebottle fly clings to the top
of an empty water jug, immobile
from the cold. It’s a bad time of year
not to be warm-blooded.
I eventually figured out that I was simply
in the train’s way, & if I laid down
Never was walking
a greater penance
than for one without any feet
& legs more numerous
than the corrosive rain.
And the to-&-fro of it:
pacing is a refuge
when you can’t stand still.
Do it long enough
& distraction turns into discipline,
the ground warms
& acquires the hard gleam
of an interrogator.
You confess, confess, confess.
Your tracks are covered
with a thin brown dust.
Sometimes, you need a bridge
where there is no river.
The ground falls away
& you need that pique experience —
looking down on everything
without ever having climbed,
sky & water wearing the calm
blue uniform of authority.
Held up by high-strung cables,
speeding through our lives,
we could all use a pause
to adjust our perspective,
get in touch with who
we really are & what
brings us here, dry-
mouthed or sweaty,
While you sway, tired, staring, your electronic earplugs
delivering their intravenous drip of distraction,
it is still there, running just
under everything,
that third rail.
dressing in
my best instructions
to work at
the world’s end
a thin nightcoat by day
and my waistcoat at night
hot so hot out here
in my hands
I rest on the green
labor of the year
wondering at the marsh
coming through the door
and seeming not to know
who I am
a letter from the elves
in angry ink
war visions begin
to devour us
alone in a room
for days brewing
like an old religion
people cannot hold
things in their hands
have the ruin of
a mind of a child
once more