CONTENTS
Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live 1
What a year looks like: drenched. So soggy here. So much
No apples on the apple tree this summer, & if there were
Another late summer early quiet blue-skied morning, my son
On either end of this year, on either end of every goddamn year,
When we turn the calendar's page, my little boy looking
The dark flurry of another morning purred
This afternoon the sky's making the kind of promises it can
Days the hours are no more fact than the unbelievable
Sometimes being here is like
To scale, yes, days to scale, even when they grow so cluttered
Just before the blood draw the other morning, I filled in small
We loved the rush hour most, the cars suit-filled, briefcase-heavy,
Today, three flights up, with my whole body, I lifted
Some disasters are given names, others called after
The truth is I have trouble forgiving most things, although I've never minded
By rote the body learns nearly everything, after
It's true. There are places we'd rather be
Not quite another season, but almost, & on the window ledges,
How I wish more things I read I misread, like the bodies in the mine
Because you're still in another time zone disparate things
The problem is the revolving door, this
Because I wasn't thinking peninsula
If there's a joke more complicated than "knock-knock," more
Too lazy to lip-read in noisy rooms, the other night
A kind of stutter, that over &
Down the hall the accordion man turns into a door
Long before the horse pulls up lame there is the matter
Back to this wind, up against it even,
The linens soften, now threadbare, just as I'm waking, small, in this
When morning was almost unrecognizable as morning
What the wind kicks up, what the waters trouble, even
The forecast's calling for flurries tomorrow, & worry
At the new year, in the dark, I watched time
The lesson tonight nothing less than
In this, this snow-brightened light of a near-spring morning, I think of his glass
How quickly the body, when asked, forgets
Stay mouthed through
How quiet every end when it comes, briefest glimpse of a future
If all the love we'll know is the kind of love
Because all day the sky held back
Not only the night
Notes
Acknowledgments