Poeme

Your Name in Early Autumn

 

This is the way you disappear.

 

Yellow apples knuckle leaf mold.

Cider-drunken bumblebees

stumble the broken skins,

prying winter open.

 

If rain darkens the sides of trees,

you will ache to drift deeper into the woods,

longing for a wolf skin,

until your name flutters

from the twigs of your fingers,

 

and you let go.

 

*

 

Walk until you are someone else.

Walk until you are nothing,

the thunk of an ax

dying among mossy trunks.

 

Crumble your name in a pocket,

the last handful of bread.

Drop letters one by one.

 

When birds find them all,

it will be too late.

 

But there is time to turn,

now, while the letters gleam in the moonlight

like faraway windows.

 

*

 

Stand before the dark mirror of your name

and strike the syllables

like matches,

 

 

letting them burn down to your fingertips

and gutter into intervals of night:

 

your face in the light smiling

 

then terrified

 

then some kind of animal

 

 

Elegy for Speech

 

It rained often.

 

Beech limbs drooped, downstream from the silver world.

 

When there was wind, the holly tree

murmured to itself, wrapped in its theories.

 

When there was no wind, words

swarmed around our mouths,

like gnats around a wound.

The Sort of Thing I Saw When I Was Keeping a Journal to Show You Later

 

The man at the corner table

gets up for another plate,

leaves chicken bones heaped.

A waitress shakes her head,

makes a little clucking pout

at the pink folds of his nape,

and clears a round of dishes.

He lays two-handed waste

to the dessert counter,

brings one plate of cookies,

one with chocolate cake

dripping cherry sauce.

 

I could explain it all

if you were here:

the mouth is a womb

where the soul can curl

alone in any crowd.

Cake is good in its accidents,

does not require one merit an essence.

 

I wonder if I will pass him later,

weeping in the parking lot,

staring at the sky,

tears glittering in the sun.

You would look away,

but I want to know everything.

 

 

Distance

 

A fall of lilac petals

drapes this stone.

It’s not her scarf.

 

 Wren

 

Standing quietly at the edge of a field,

counting again the many small failures of devotion

that have brought him to this silence—

until he is so still a wren lands near,

hops onto his foot. Its tiny vibrant weight,

before he shifts minutely and sends it flying,

the wren’s eye inscrutable and other.

He aches to pretend the world has touched him.