December 2011
4 posts
DETAIL OF THE WOODS
I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do.
A box made out of leaves.
What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless.
Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else.
I kept my mind on the moon. Cold moon, long nights moon.
From the landscape: a sense of scale.
From the dead: a sense of scale.
I turned my back on the story. A sense of...
AND AFTER THIS
I have nothing holy to say. I paint his face with ashes from my cigarettes, tiny crosses on his forehead. He says my fingers smell like clementines, but his are covered in motor oil and sea salt. I tell him about my mother after surgery, about her face like a moon and my life lost in her round cheeks. I want to visit the cemetery, find a headstone meant for me. I will rub it onto paper with a...
from BOOKS
You don’t know it yet but what you’ll miss
is the books, heavy and fragrant and frayed,
the pages greasy, almost transparent, thinned
at the edges by hundreds of licked thumbs.
What you’ll remember is the dumb joy
of stumbling across a passage so perfect
it drums in your head, drowns out
the teacher and the lunch bell’s ring. You’ve stolen
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from the...
from DOWN
i.
They were wrong about the sun.
It does not go down into
the underworld at night.
The sun leaves merely
and the underworld emerges.
It can happen at any moment.
It can happen in the morning,
you in the kitchen going through
your mild routines.
Plate, cup, knife.
All at once there’s no blue, no green,
no warning.
ii.
Old thread, old line
of ink twisting out into the clearness
we call...