Traveling Light
There was a time before
when I knew nothing
and that was good.
Fire crosses the plains
the smoke
carries for miles. But I
cannot hold it in my arms
or implore it to be still.
Water works its way through rock
drop by drop, the birds
throw their bodies against the sky
every night, and the world
is awash in rumors of pain.
I want to settle in the interstices
everywhere, watch
as the lenticular light
lays waste to the landscape
every goddamn day.
I want to wander
as an amnesiac, the stutter
in celluloid before it burns away.
Not nothing just
something without
everything.
The poem I’ll never stop writing
for Moira Brady Averill
You saw every person as an invitation,
a chance for anything to happen, as possible
delight and salvation and meaning in this world
and you demanded that of all of us
and it was amazing and exhausting
and having a conversation with you
was like being pulled into a prismatic wormhole
lined with longing and pain and things
of great beauty, grandeur and love,
melancholy and impatience, the Paris Review
and U2 and snail salad and the sister of someone
you met when you were working in a puppet show
or at the zoo or as a freelance house cleaner for
an aging famous author or when you almost
got Lyme on Long Island during that residency
where everyone wore white and spoke slowly
and with great meaning and it was always too quiet
for you so you holed up at the local library
with the dust motes and the spotty internet and the AC
and wrote a full book of poems in a week.
Who will steal my clothes and ruin my pots
with ill begotten secret dinner parties, but leave me
a stunning ceramic vase and a house covered in Pledge?
Who will make me eat snail salad and sneak into secret concerts
and furiously edit the full book of poems they wrote in a week
and always always smoke too many cigarettes?
This is the last love letter I will write you.
Sometimes I can’t say the words I just
feel my chest constrict with their presence
and it hurts but it’s beautiful and too much
(just like you) and here you are
pushing me to write again that’s so like you
and all the things that dance through
my mind. I don’t want this to stop,
I just miss you, we just miss you,
always all the time, but I hear you
over my shoulder whispering
Just finish it! and then tell me
how it came out. Tell me how it is.
Self-Care
Washing as meditation
Picking up as meditation:
persons, barrettes, dirty dishes,
used tissues, string cheese wrappers,
loose thread, single socks, books,
toenails, singly or in piles, cat food cans,
headphones, bags of hidden sweets,
glasses, lip balm, extension cords, hats
Scheduling as meditation
Arguing as meditation
Texting as meditation
Laundry as meditation
Meditation as meditation
Checking in as meditation
Masturbation as meditation
Making meals as meditation:
eggs, sandwiches, oatmeal, ramen,
lasagna, soup, pierogies, salads, fish,
brownies, toast, quinoa
Pet care as meditation
Screaming as meditation
Bruxism as meditation
Tight hips as meditation
Middle aged weight gain as meditation
Empty checking account as meditation
Parking tickets as meditation
Lying senselessly on the couch
at the end of yet another day as meditation
Redaction as meditation
Nation state collapse as meditation
Apocalypse as meditation
Getting too close to the dark thing
standing behind you as meditation
The totality, a varied but utter sameness
that suffocates as meditation
Time moving through you as meditation
The fact of your body, your hands
a sick little hope you can’t kick away
following you like a whiny dog as meditation
This breath as meditation
This end and with it all the beginnings crowding in upon you,
their awkward expectations of your future as meditation
The will to have nothing to say
but keep on wanting to say it as meditation
Fear unending as the blinking cursor on this page,
of things rushing onward forever until they just end
without permission or plan
Before Sex
Black shock of trees
Thick dusk descending
indigo through the window
where the wind comes in
a little, next to our bed
January: Jacob’s Ladder
Blanched rainbows of windshield-smeared salt and the timely tiny tingling of the river breaking itself apart in the warming air its frozen skin riddled with fractures It is January and under the thick chaos of chill I become a brittle sloughing shell It is a new year but everything feels old and rumpled The light vanishes almost as soon as it appears In the next room someone is always coughing or blowing their nose or an ambulance flies by its red light and wail stridently splattering the dark In bed in the early morning we reach for each other that elemental warmth of being but underneath is the void of all that bodies cannot do or be and outside the windows it is black and mist rises off the water like a plague hissing I wear white cotton gloves at night to absorb something There is forever and there is now and they do not seem that far apart but there is also this persistent night that loops through our lives like a syndication We keep our eyes propped open waiting for the new to happen but it simply does not
and this is the gift we have been given