7/2/15
It mattered, didn't it, all
the babies that smiled at me
on the way to Caitlin's place
which is around the corner
from your first apartment

like the fawn that night

and when I got there
I sensed rain and rose my open
hand to the air

I am ready to take whatever comes now
I am ready.



8/15/15
The night a hat gently on my head
this covering more than I ever had

the love flowering from the bones
might just as easily have been worms

this is what it's like to look a thing in its
eye socket

to breathe in the same space you used to fill
      until you no longer did
leaving behind these circuses of air.



8/24/15
Girl, girl. Let your hair down like a veil
Today you are 20
and moving into a dorm room with four girls
and four corners and many tiny white lights



8/30/15
The smell of coffee
up the stairs
my bed a table I lay myself across

and the moon all huge and yellow
and bobbing in the sky

When my bed is not a table
it is a boat
and I am alone in a sea



9/5/15
the little girl through the window
says "he loves me he loves me not
he loves me"



10/24/15
I am very tight inside of myself -
every muscle tuned to the key
of moonlight puddled in a curled leaf

Do not speak, but collect
your words and press
them beneath your tongue
so that I may find them
when I kiss you.



Dates Unrecorded:
to say God and really mean it

Rain raised the river
rain ran to the river

"I was thinking of how I had to break
the binding in order to make the book
lie flat"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omhHQ2mVWXU

What parts of us do we frequent? What tuning do we
sleep to? What was it like to love you? Remember.
I don't. I feel unfinished - and somehow young -

We are greatly sad, we are gently lost and leaning
in doorways and listening to piano music that
saturates our clothing and catches on the locks

we are ghosting ourselves, never responding to last
questions, standing ourselves up for dinner so that,
when we come to, we find our vacant bodies bending
into the yellow light of the fridge in a dark kitchen
at some neglected time of night

we run out of milk and make the best of it
we run out of hope and make a collect call
to the last place we saw it

wondering if it's draped its bony body over
the divan, a copy of some lessor Dostoevsky
in one hand and a cigarette in the other

and then the world turns around and astonishes us

I saw a man who reminded me of you in the card
section while I was lost amongst the vegetables
considering the price of beets and all the different shades
of green, and I thought this man, he is older than the
last time I saw you but that you are older than the last
time I saw you and so am I

A child walked by with a fire hat and said hello
and I floated toward to the deli.

I didn't wake up until that night in the middle
of a dream in which you and your lover had moved
into a dark house with low ceilings and narrow hallways,
a raised ranch, right across from my mother's house

and I couldn't understand who you were now. I kept looking
for the boy I knew who studied maps and communism and
art history now and then. I kept asking God where he went.
The dream went on all night until I made peace with this loss,
and just as I did you walked by and held your pointer and thumb
finger together as if to say "I was this close to coming to you"

and I couldn't speak for fear of crying but I looked at you as if to say
"I was here the whole time, waiting" but I know that's not the
story you know or the dreams you have and I know now that
your stories and your dreams are no less true than mine

When I woke it was fall and the leaves were already
carpeting the ground and the milkweed was floating
and the hawk that my mother believes to be my father
was perched over the fence you built, watching the clouds.