A student says in class:

there are two meanings to the word husband
the verb: to carefully use or manage

That night a student says to me in a dream:

I don't mind the dirt and I like the twists
but, I swear, this winding dirt road better
lead somewhere eventually

and we watch the camera pan out
and the road keeps going
through valleys and trees and fields
and there are mountains further off

we know
every road leads
somewhere eventually.

But sometimes I forget that
and it seems like all the streetlights
have turned to trees
and I am lost and there is snow in my beard
or in his and I mistake myself in dreams for a
man I used to know
and I am trying on men I don't know
and wearing their bruises
and it seems to make sense since I am 
32 and that is an age to begin to think about what
might be around the bend
and besides my ovaries hurt

but

i am further from home with men
who believe that I am lying
when I say I would rather be a very ancient
wall on which people write their secrets
than a mother or a thing that is easily
managed or used

what home but the road is there for a woman
who will not be had?

The moon's eyelid is half shut

the cross my father made me

dangles from the only nail left in the 

plaster, all the others having pulled 

from the wall and then pulled the wall with them.

I am not my father's daughter: there are many bent nails,
broken hammers, and dead plants in my possession.

I imagine if I were Basho I would look
to the mist over a mountain or the dew on a blossom
and know transcendence but I live in a city
and I am alone with the grain of the wood floor 

and the chill from the thin windows.

What they don't tell you when you lose someone 

is that it happens more than once.

I have lost my father every day for two years,

The plaster on the wall is waiting to crumble
and I am waiting to be fully returned to myself,
but still, there is the swollen eye of the moon,
the whittled night, the orange street lights
that dangle like fruit.

I am a thousand years old and Basho is my
mailman. 

10/26/15

I have been living from my stomach lately
in the center of that trembling
that comes from coffee or the days before
unutterable change

I am getting smaller
so that I can climb further
in, so that I can touch those places
that still burn

the cilia tangle, blushing at my nearness

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.

Summer gathered her children 
and rowed all the boats to the edge

of the land and waited for the darkening 
so she could close her torn hands.

She hung her apron from the moon 
and stretched her body over the horizon. 

She sang a song we couldn't hear. 

We all die when she does - 

her lonely suckling at stars
her green complaint against the sky

a reckoning. 

There are things moving we can't see
my mother says

wood beams in houses that contract
rocks rising through dirt

I said "pin nah chey" and you said
"it's pinawsh" and I folded the correct
pronunciation and a silver shame
into the bird cage of my chest

I remember something as a rose petal -
either your mouth of my nipple -
and the bed was so hard I remember
sleep as a plumb line

and there were train tracks in that
room with us in a weak white light
and speakeasy doors

Can you remember the password?
It's important in case anyone takes our
body and wears it around as a costume
at galas or bars or tea parties

my neck is strained from looking for you

I hear my voice in your head as a silver bell

I hope your sciatic nerve has stopped choking you
I hope your body has worked itself to joy
And I hope when you dream of me
I am walking towards you with all my bones
exposed