had I stayed.
Half-Life
Wearing a shirt that’s yours, and a tie you tied.
The schools have closed.
It’s our opportunity to sleep.
Paint the bathroom, the kitchen – blue.
Egg nestled at the bottom of a huge nest.
There’s no trouble to listen to, and no,
there are no vegetables in sugar.
Yet late yesterday, I ate one, and stayed home to make a mixed tape.
We have beliefs, like anyone.
We made the choices that led to these results.
Sometimes sleeping in holes dug in the ground,
sometimes in bombed-out buildings.
Accused of being optimists,
we did a lot of thinking and hesitating,
every day finding more to give away.
The same nostril kept bleeding,
but the other was clear, and through it
I could breathe.
A Week of Silence
This is where our narratives diverge.
You went down that dry riverbed.
I climbed to the mountains.
Some say monks hide there
and that their clothes are ugly.
I found the spring and washed my face, feet and hands.
A deer with the eyes of my kindest sister
stopped near me.
All my advice fell like brittle leaves in a dying forest.
I had never felt less alone.
The green glow of ferns and nettle, water droplets on moss.
I do not wish to keep anyone
from their scheduled visit to the underworld.
So please, friend, continue on without me.
One Virtue
Boys could be in any park kissing.
The crows call them boys, anyway.
A few people are still listing reasons.
A few are choking on blackberries.
I’m a mother, son, lawyer, etc.
But we don’t have anything in common.
The crows: curious, demanding.
Some mother is always there, knowing what we didn’t have.
Some romances are conducted by email and some after death.
We’ll be aged, polishing our bruises, calling it passion or confusion.
In the park, near the tracks …
Just as a mirror falls and
we must work in pairs
and alone.
The Incense of Those Rooms
I back away slowly.
Depending on what my needs are.
Depending on who asks.
A landscape of musk –
Selling my mask
to a cynical child.
We used to go there before the fire.
It’s hard to know how to story things,
what anything means or meant.
The good of a few drops of peppermint oil.
Old betrayals burning in the back.
Aboard, I was well-read, an unreal self.
Evaluated and humiliated,
enduring
to make way for real knowledge.
It overwhelms.
‘A million scarves,’ is what
I wanted to say.
Back to Our Bodies
I still smell like the incense of those rooms.
Come back and I will sing for you and show you I am not surprised by death.
A ghost is made when someone dies and feels restless.
She is living in the park with a guitar.
She is one of the critics who most believes.
The city is full of verbs and selfish people.
A quiet class of city dwellers siphoning all the money.
Hovering above their habitual clinics, I saw the sickness and paranoia,
the waves of fatherly protectiveness,
the cold intelligence animating it all.
And I fell.
Under the Midnight Tree
The unthinkable happens.
And then what? then what do you think?
If the monks meant it
at our hospice
we will meditate.
Consciousness has become big business –
and our expectations were unreasonably high.
A small moment on starbird road:
You kissed my forehead
and I saw things differently.
What should I say to her now?
She is just a stranger.
The music is painful, intentional.
We get angry and try to reject the photographer.
She killed a morning with her shattered glass,
her essay smelling of cigarettes.
We didn’t know how impatient
it all could be.
Sleeping in the cold, making fiction with our eyes.
Everything in place
as we are moved.
Weird Shrine
We don’t know the names of the streets.
We bike down.
We bike down.
Zero family members are travelling with me.
I bike down.
Sleep-deprived-like, ferry wind & ice cream
if you ask.
We took it all seriously & personally.
We took a lot of pills.
We killed a lot of mothers
in our dreams
& we hid a lot of little boys in baskets.
We are not like my heaven.
& we are biking down.
A horned deer-child, bird-like,