be less sure
of the emptiness
upon which sit
the cities of your pain

a great yawning
a centerless plane

be less sure now
of this filtering light
and the pebbles it lands
between

you spread your fingers
and what you lost is not
less yours because it is now
elsewhere

In as much as anything is ours
-even our names are given to us
only for a time -
what you never had
you possess more
in absence

because absence is a memorized space
created by the arches of longing and losing

and when you embrace it
you are finally
suddenly
through

conditioned

woke in the middle of the night
no longer drunk
but wrung out
of seven different liquors
and the regrettable silence
I never keep
pregnant, sick, with the space
words leave when they leave
and I still haven't said a thing

it's like trying to get
to that deeper layer of muscle,
scraping the fat away
through disciplined
arches of the eyebrow
and concentrated
flares of the nostril

through throwing the last
of your baggage in a bindle
over your shoulder
after carving whatever
you were supposed to carve
on the post

through stretching to pick
the highest hanging fruit

and I wonder if I have plucked it too soon
even as it swells within me -
the juices sweet on my lips
but in my stomach, a sword.

somewhere in the coat you never owned
never even thought of until just now
is an address written down in case you needed it

and the paper is yellow
and ripped from a legal pad
from a life you almost lived

and the address is familiar
like fire on your lips

and you are touching
lightly this paper in your mind
and you are chewing on the edge of it
and staring into a street you don't know
a street you will never know

and it is winter and the coat is warm
and made of some kind of fur
and white as the snow blowing from the west
A wind you can't name places its hand on your neck


                             ****

In the morning, in your sleep, you slipped your
hand into the warm pocket of his sweatpants
as you bodies moved separately through dreams

When you woke, your head fit where the muscles
of his shoulder and arm meet
and when he sat up and said what he said
you were scared
and then suddenly
you understood
and then suddenly again
you were home

I am trying to learn you

your eyes and your smile
and the smile that is there
when you are not smiling

I haven't found that yet
and sometimes I mistake
your thinking face for an
anger I have seen before,

and it scares me, the quickness
of your clouds

but I think that is just as foolish
as making fun of German because
of its guttural sounds when it
contains the word sehnsucht.

How little I know of your pain
and its circumference.

How little I know of the coming joy.

When you touch me I know
my stories and sadnesses
and also how small they are,
how they are mice haunting
the walls of this house
and after we fight, sitting
across from each other
on your bed, I know I don't
even have to set traps

but rather, just stop feeding them.

I dreamed we were tuning 
our voices to crickets
We kept talking about broken trees
as a metaphor for maybe broken bones
or fingers that no longer worked
because of sunburn or jalapeno juice 
and the paralysis that ensued for years
after the incision or eruption

It wasn't Vesuvius
but I walked until my skin broke 
and if I outran the fire 
I didn't know until now
because I died anyway
in a certain way,
in a certain way. 

And later, in bed, we were cautious,
taking up each others arms
as umbrellas
as circles within which to dance

It is September
late enough in the summer
to burn candles by my bed
late enough in my life
to abandon this curated loneliness  
 

I had forgotten that I wrote
my father's obituary.
What a revelation to find it
three years later
in my email archives
while searching for something else
in August by the sea
as the sun sets behind the light house
and the water moves
in the familiar way
of his smile.
Whether or not he loved
the taste of blueberries
I will always pair him
with the slick blue sweet
taste of northern mountains
and rocky sea coasts
and an optimism that followed
him to the the last.
I am a phoenix he said
I am a phoenix and I am 
about to rise.
I think he must have finally ended his
long argument with God
because lately in my dreams
he's been far more pleasant,
insisting he faked his own death
and has many more lives to live.