The Widow
Courage is a centrifuge, an open mouth,
a subterranean subterfuge, a shoe untied.
Where are his glasses?
I ask no one.
Alone is a trip made of symmetry, a crucible,
a flattery of open books, a paused embrace.
Just one apparition could send me spinning
unbalanced by scarlet buttons or bad brakes,
a simple distillation of elemental forces
in solution, behind veils, eyes beneath coins.
Does the dog know who will shovel the snow?
I ask the pearls in the mirror around my neck.
Monday is an alien destiny of disgust
and fascination, both leaning on each other
like bookends, a shiva, but altogether better than
Sunday, a windowless room in a pine house.
Tuesday is an earthquake,
and the landfill cracks open
to reveal a stratum of waste from 1970,
all things suddenly out of season.
Who can pull weeds from around the squash?
Thursday is another day, as if the comet’s tail
might sweep the kitchen floor.
The archeologist arrives to explain the pain
in shades of newsprint, nail polish, and guacamole,
in which he uses a twisting logic to say
it is indeed from Spain,
and the lack of sunlight has preserved the color
of my spleen, swollen with poison and a sort of
sheen, like a Yiddish proverb.
I am a banquet for the birds.
Once around the block, please.
Losing the Better Part of Us
Because a flower turns around at night
it needs the tears of hindsight to see
the mind of infinity flare,
blowing out in a flash of wit
your life unabridged, and me shifting
in that feral wind to meet every movement,
all the passions like wildfire, tilted up to the sky
to try and find you night after night,
missing you, a twilit castaway—
petals on a savage river, or the zest of your skin
flying up inside the numbing starlight,
answering yes, always yes, to the life we created
becoming the pink upon the mist, never needing
to look back because the tides have stopped,
and the clouds have fled from the blue,
until only the river stones beneath our bare feet,
a Stellarum Fixarum,
come together the same at the beginning as at the end.
I reach through the swash to hold you again,
in the midst,
your phantom gaze bearing me thunderstruck,
into being by the high of counting
every follicle on our newborn child’s head,
and then all the moments in between rush passed us
in a blur of grief, but also wonder,
and the stories of our passage, our arrival here without you
on this plain of feathers, scales, hairs, and flowers,
mix with fear, desire, rancor, and doubt,
more than any tree might contain in root, leaf, or bark,
or any church might burn in wax
to loft the prayers and wishes of bringing you back,
all of us wicks bending flame in the Harmattan breeze,
to gently wipe clean
your dour end with some new diluvial fever
of birth, a pure poem of providence,
of animal spirits and celestial virtue,
a primeval brume rolling down my face in beads
in another race to the strand
to find the beach pebbles end
again at the start.
Our Poor Circulation
Don’t wake the baby again
by dredging my body of sleep,
her polite icicle dream bits float
barefoot in the pumping snow
rolling under the door awake now
gasping bold pleas for warm milk.
My cold feet with distant kid fears
closing the smallest pores—
our refrigerator and television hum clear
to preserve the eggs and stories,
far-flung choices and memories pickled
by simple human voices murmuring
the echo of endless need.
Her tiny hands reach out
for cathedral air on pale lumps of skin,
fleshy triggers that set hunger adrift.
My breasts are under the Moon
and full of godly ichor.
A pair of half-frozen hosts
as patient as stained glass,
they suffer glacial hours of cell division
swelling seesaw like weal and woe,
thawing, eroding, blinking
the distance of years away,
recalling hairy faces beaming,
empty with bald lust,
the men who tried to love me
like curling black smoke from old wiring,
sparking clutters of wild fascination
abruptly whipping tongues of flame
into a bright Ferris wheel of abandon,
who then left my bed of williwaw
rushing out into the blizzard
of brides and wives,
as fathers must.
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