I could live in the descending chords of a seventies serenade, / the spacious tawny bars breaking the light into golden bricks. / I would have been at the guitar all day while / you went to your class and gathered flowers in a / clutch of muslin on your way home…
I plucked an owl pellet from the ground / cradling it, delicate, as if a palm-sized bird / and not the mass of bones and fur purged / from a second stomach. In science class / as a girl, I learned these dark forms teemed / with the remnants of undigested pieces…
Hollow, like a tunnel-boned bird, / the cello is held securely by its neck / while one hand twists the tuning peg, / evoking a shrill, sharp sound. / From the farmhouse / an ill-fated rooster calls out…
It’s now, she says. Now, & never again – so we beat on, boats against the current & swooned slowly, heard the snow falling faintly through the universe. I had been there before, lying on my back, thumbing my nose at You Know Who, which is why I don’t tell anyone anything. If I do, I start missing everybody. Poo-tee-weet said the bird under firebombs & the old man was dreaming about lions. Quién es? said Billy the Kid. Don’t let me drop. There, on the ground under the almond tree, pleasure of simple joys & the happy summer days, borne back ceaselessly into gray – there’s no good way to say goodbye.
It’s not like you can compress the files of love to fit them in, there are eight thousand sixty twelve of them in orange steel drawers, not labeled well: you can’t, say, squeeze in rows of tiny corn urging up along North Professor, bottles of daylight leaking in the patient ditch while robins tug the slippery threads that hold it… Read more →