she has been saying goodbye to everything.

green tea at dusk. news of b-52 bombers

flying in one ear, out the other, always

t-minus twenty minutes to doomsday.

the chipped spot where someone threw a

vase & a temper tantrum last easter.

the imprinted image of refrigerated

trucks & lifeless bodies in brooklyn.

You are all futility and blind greed–

insubstantial, yet taking up space.

Making me bleed

money to pay pink taxes and

repent of original sin.

You’re assigned to collect eggs

like a supermarket shelf–

but some slovenly stock girl sleeps

as the biological clock tick-tocks on

and the sun rises and sets.

get up some

mornings

when the fog

covers the

grass knee high,

still uncut. it

blankets the hill

and shrouds the

mountain in the

near distance.

It wasn’t too late for me,

a cover for every pot, she said.

With my artistic bent-of-mind,

she’d have no trouble teaching

me to cook crème patisseries

and baba au rhum. I should

spend my coins on almonds

and vanilla beans instead

of another sketching pencil.

There are more than 200 hypotheses

about the fall of Rome. This is certain:

from 536 to 537 AD a spasm of volcanic

activity darkened the sun. “We marvel

to see no shadows of our bodies at noon,”

wrote the politician Cassiodorus.

I baked banana bread today

one with walnuts that I crushed

with my inheritance, her rolling pin,

honeyed with the patina of yesterday’s strudel

burn marks from when it got too close the flame.

Two feet long tapered at the ends

It’s an overnight flight,

out my window a full moon floats on the horizon

Up there, 30,000 feet, I convince myself

the moon is a destination for anyone

A somewhere to buy a ticket to

after catching wanderlust from an advertisement on the cramped subway.

No one would know that you stopped in your track short.

A beautiful ruin among tree trunks, you rest.

Pinecones assemble a pattern, seabound, see-through.

Like angels, on bramble and thorn,

goats here feast.

And on the blooming hill

She pats my hair dry with a towel.

Comes rung of wash and sinew.

Dislodging my stacked dreamhood.

Milk-haired Midwestern mothers line the corridors

And tell me I’m delicate in that forlorn way.

What was it that fully fashioned your belly

to an extent where clothes can no longer have shape

but must be fabric flapping formless in a breeze,

hiding a slowly forming human who knows nothing

of clothes, of color, of shape,

knowing only shades of light and sounds

that the knowledgeable ones describe like a vacuum cleaner,

a machine whirring away

picking up dust and dirt,

which is not what a womb does,

are not the sounds we make.

New ground to fall upon

sweating.

Stinking of exhaustion

we follow the migration,

chasing the work.

A movement choreographed by barren blocks

and paychecks,

pitchbound.

Magnetized to this unfolding,

uncertain as it is,

we dance with proximity;

a mutual commitment to intimacy and expanse.

Not wanting to lose touch,

not yet.

Whistling is the wind’s work,

so we listen to learn.

Marry the winter fields.

Marry the mountains that stand

at the horizon’s lip, their white heads

on fire. Marry the row of cedars

that stand as if between you

and eternity. Marry the noise

of passing traffic, the plastic bag

blowing across the fields, the Doppler call

of a passing train.

Sometimes I don’t want to rise.

Refractory, resistant, I stomp down

the buoyant air, the rebound

bubbling up beneath.

After the car hit my grandfather

as he crossed the street

on his daily walk,

the thief who was stealing it sped away.

My grandfather's head was swollen,

asymmetric from the crack

in his skull. The doctor declared

his groaning did not mean he was alive—

body laid out on a stainless-steel cart

in a crowded hallway. This confused us;

he sounded like he was trying to talk.

When he resumed the song, she crawled inside

the piece note upon note like a stairway to a

dream. It made her toes sweat as she tapped to tap

it away. Woman and horn were now hardwired

for rebellion

Assume you could wake tomorrow and feel something

other than momentous grief, do that one-foot-then-the-other thing.

How it felt to drive fast

through city blocks at night,

racing yellow lights

to reach the next one green.

The man’s eyes are closed.

Perhaps he is praying.

I move like a whisper

so as not to disturb him.

I notice the lines in his neck

hush of breath

like a clean wind.

I.

After a long time away,

I walk out of the river.

In metaphor, I would wear a pale blue dress—

lifting the hem imprudently to collect sagebrush, heaping.

Instead it is winter, with no metaphor.

I hold the coyote’s head beneath the water;

the effort warms my body.

Beneath the blue summer dress,

I try to articulate this intersection of light.