Museum
I thought of the collective wisdom. Then,
I thought my way out of it —
Inside the art of the ages
hangs onward as it has before
and will hang on always as
the ageless shoulders of a boy,
heavy in a red wet snow suit, carried
by his father home. To love
the inner world with all of its little rooms
for homesickness to be tucked in.
You could shake
a coppery coin at the truth,
or simply let it go
or forget it. A girl’s small hands hold out
a book like a white plate,
but must find something sturdy
to eat off.
This is how it goes — our own hideous history
winced from the dog’s paw by a nail clipper.
Someone throws his or her body on the tracks
and it’s all you need to know. Still,
we miss something now
and then but we don’t think of it.
But the feeling remains full in the stomach.
Pecks away like the robin’s rotund breast.
What a robin does is place one claw
into the ground and unearth the inside.
The city serves the living with
a flight of birds overhead
broken from out of the shrubbery.
They are like the dreams that doors pursue
and low-ceilings.
* * * * *
Seat at the Kitchen Window
Like the window,
a mirage sends through you
the figure of a woman
similar who, when things get lonely
and the day muddles at her door
where the street barber waits,
asks to enter
so he can remedy her outsides
in front of a mirror.
But who can guess then
what shape the shade
of your insides will take —
a fish mouth bloom,
a tree with its tumor of viscous
sap, still runny.
Your inner life subtracted,
the mirror frames
the front stairs to the door, the steps
unfurled like a dog’s tongue.
Two little girls standing there
hold up their hands.
Fingers out. Pistols drawn.
Mimicking each other’s movements —
their faces filmed by a camera.
* * * * *
Left Over
So much milk in the fields, in the udders of the landscape—
when will someone ask for my pint of blood?
When stepping out early with mud print and sober morning,
these small steps wish for a stable landing,
pursue the late, last star ricocheted from a jet wing.
Dawn spreads over a black tarmac. I always gloss over
the things that embarrass me — poetry embarrasses me.
And so do these small gestures of kindness
like dorsals surfacing from friends who
soon after morning forget what they had once shared with me.
Sometimes I get so lonely for myself I cling
with the last fleck of new year left on the window,
where all the year before flushed milky-eyed, odorless, and cold.
But I tell myself this: Some light sits low for a whole season.
* * * * *
Static
Everything is moving on its own again. The table
rolls the apple, the apple falls,
and the faucet slurs another droplet of
water. Glasses
stacked together, they trill in the everyday brightness.
There is an order
to this kind of letting go: my sister walks the evening sun
slowly, cold
in the garden, the garden of branches un-tacking
leaves — their flagrant orange
far from the doom space of
the living room, a roofing overhead where
sky turns to slates.
If not for the dust sifting air
I would not know how to let go into all of this
unattended static, to fall off
like the cropped wheeze
of a Montana preacher
I imagine being
neither malignant or benign as he clutches
the throat of his ashen collar.