He backs up, his fist falling at his side.
He backs up, his fist falling at his side.
She is curled tight in a corner, her glasses crushed.
She is curled tight in a corner, her glasses crushed.
He is her tight fist in a corner. Backs curled,
glasses falling. She, crushed up at his, his side.

Without her glasses, he blurs into something soft.
Without her glasses, he blurs into something soft.
She accepts his kiss and makes him dinner.
She accepts his kiss and makes him dinner.
And blurs - dinner, he, her glasses, accepts soft
something, without, into him. She makes his kiss.

The shutter slaps the side of the house all night.
The shutter slaps the side of the house all night.
Dark now. Afraid, she counts his belts hanging from their hook.
Dark now. Afraid, she counts his belts hanging from their hook.
All afraid of belts, the shutter hanging from their house,
she side-slaps the night, the now. His dark hook counts.

She accepts the slaps, the belts, dinner glasses, glasses crushed.
His fist blurs into a hook curled tight in his side. Now,
the dark is hanging from their backs, her corner, shutter
at side of his house. All night, she, falling,
afraid without something soft. She makes up
his kiss and counts: he, he, him, his.

I owe you an explanation.
My first memory isn't your own
of an empty box. My babyhood cabinets held
a countlessness of cakes, my backyard
rotted into apple glut, windfalls of
money-tree, mouthfuls of fib.

At puberty I liked the locks,
I was the one who made them fast.
The yelling in our hallways was about
lost money, or lost love, but not
lost life. Or so I see it now:
in those days I romanticized
a risk (I thought I'd die
in the alcoholic automobile, die
at the hands of nerveless dentistry). Small hearts
were printed in the checkbook; when my parents called me
dear, they meant expensive.

Where were you in all that time? Out looking for
your father's body? Making for your mother's room?
I got my A's in English, civics,
sweetness and light; you got black eyes, and F's,
and nowhere fast. By 1967 when we met
(if you could call it making an acquaintance,
rape) I was a mal-adjusted gush, a sucker for
placebos. Walking home from Central Square, I came to have
the good girl's petty dread: the woman

to whose yard you dragged me might
detect us, and be furious. More than anything else
I wanted no one mad at me. (Propriety,
or was it property, I thought
to guard: myself I gave away.)

And as for you, you had the shakes,
were barely seventeen yourself, too raw
to get it up (I said don’t be afraid,
afraid of what might happen if you failed).
And afterwards, in one of those moments
it's hard to tell (funny from fatal) you did
a terrible civility: you told me

thanks. I'll never forget
that moment all my life.
It wasn't until then, as you
were sheathing it to run,

I saw the knife.

We are afraid of being touched, because we are afraid of being finally killed. We are afraid they are going to take the last thing left. We are afraid. We are afraid of what happens when we stop owning our own tremors or when we ask for stop, there will not be a stop. Afraid. This is a symbol for the fear. Call it averted gaze -- it is written in his flinch, in her I can't reach you on the other end of ecstasy love, on the lines we paint on thighs to fend off threat, the never being nude, only distracted by pain, the lurch through lives we live on the first layer, skimming the surface of skins and never reaching down, clasping hands of prayer in the bathwater warmth of chests flooding with relief during the you didn't hurt me exhale and the fear in flight as distant tumbleweeds, dancing a light trench across the square states of memory. Our bodies are not impassible, there are no mountains, only plains, so when you enter us, you enter entirety. But only if we don't catch you, only if we don't solder the edges out of our terrible lips. Only if we don't draw the blinds and board the windows when you, like a hurricane, stumble upon the lands you assume to reflect your own. If only. Our way of being god is supplying you with your demand -- the reflection of your shadow-hover over our inaccessible eyes. Sometimes, we touch you and whisper the hungry half-formed syllables of love yet to love, and when you touch us, tangible as vapor leaking, we are touched and we are never there. You can see us, but you can't see us. We were born, and then we started leaving. We were always leaving. I say we were never inch-by-inch-by no please don't-inch ever there in the first place. We never had a choice, this is a choice. This is an emergency. This is how we happened.

The day my body caught fire
the woodland darkened. The horizon
was a sea of maids, rushing to piece me
back into a girl. Out of the girl came yellow
flowers, came stem & sepal.
You never happened, they said.
The meadow was a narration of lessness.
Inside the corral, horses fell
from the impact of lightning. They broke
down. I heard gunshots in my sleep.
I was a keeper of breath,
of hay. I walked a field, collecting bones.
You can build a house out of bones.
You can stand at the doorway
quarrelling with your legs to enter
or run until you turn to ash.

In a world where all the heroes
are pilots with voices like God
he brought her a strand of some woman’s

hair to wear on her wing.
She looked sideways at the ground
silent behind the cloudy film covering

her eyes knowing she would be his
forever. They cruised the city nights
each one spiralling away from the other

but always coming home to gather stories.
Dark streets bright tavern lights drunks
filled with beer in the gutters.

The flicker of stars shaped like a hunter’s
arrow bent stars that twinkled like babies’
eyes. No babies for them. She was an outcast.

He a loner. A perfect pair.
Winters had made him wise
and he avoided the single nests of summer.

He told her about things she could see.
How the dismal cover of clouds roils and explodes
and the ground aches like an old woman’s knee.

How wood rots against the tide
good for hunting grub.
How to fade and fall back into the wind.

He translated her pulse
into near-language. Their poetry so personal
even Peterson’s Field Guide could not tap it.

Only a stray hunter saw it.
Shook his head once thinking it a trick
of wind and wing then turned his eyes north

to search for the simple flight
of Brant or Canadian. Those patterns
he could easily understand.

That last night they drank from the river.
Sucked its delicate cusps of mold
sang anti social songs as if they were humans.

When he flicked his handsome head
to catch the drift of wind
she even managed a single tear.

She waited through days and nights
of grief. Circled the city less
then settled on the wires.

The metallic conductor captured her eyes.
She remembered how he proudly sang her name
as he pranced from pole-top to KV line.

One last fluff of feathers. One sigh
for all the unnested summers.
One single scratch

one electrical surge of power of love.
Then she fell smiling.
A trick he had taught her.

Her. But not her. Her. N.'s whole world
was broken down like this,

into the women he would or would not
have. With some, it was whether

they had the kind of beauty
that cauterized eyes, the one hundred fictions

of it, like chokeweed that could root
anywhere and begin to thrive.

With others, he measured potential,
their ability to slip from contemporary cotton

into cocktail shooters, a brown sugar backstory
that could start, say, in a cornfield,

aroused by a little subjugation, verbs
he'd take a shine to when he'd single her out:

lure, charm, exhaust, burn. Either way
it had to turn. In the beginning, peonies.

Eventually, gasoline. When it did turn,
he'd weigh the baroque/throat

rhyme of her beauty against everything legal,
find ways to unbecome it, an elegance

he'd chip away at and have, and not have, and have
until it was a broken thing, a bird unwinged.

Until she was a ghost.
He did not have an eye for ghosts.

after Rachel McKibbens

My sister told me a soul mate is not the person
who makes you the happiest but the one who
makes you feel the most, who conducts your heart

to bang the loudest, who can drag you giggling
with forgiveness from the cellar they locked you in.
It has always been you. You are the first

person I was afraid to sleep next to,
not because of the fear you would leave
in the night but because I didn’t want to wake up

ungracefully. In the morning, I crawled over
your lumbering chest to wash my face and pinch
my cheeks and lay myself out like a still-life

beside you. Your new girlfriend is pretty
like the cover of a cookbook. I have said her name
into the empty belly of my apartment. Forgive me.

When I feel myself falling out of love with you,
I turn the record of your laughter over, reposition
the needle. I dust the dirty living room of your affection.

I have imagined our children. Forgive me. I made up
the best parts of you. Forgive me. When you told me
to look for you on my wedding day, to pause

on the altar for the sound of your voice
before sinking myself into the pond of another
love, forgive me. I mistook it for a promise.

Evan says the idea that you can be transformed by love
is melodramatic and childish, the kind of thing you leave
behind at the last slumber party or give up the day you stop
actually pondering the existence of unicorns. He says
love unveils you. That whoever you were you still are.

Only now maybe you’re more so. You can afford courage.
Evan says it makes you shameless- that it’s safe now
to reclaim whoever you were before you became embarrassed.
He says we all masquerade as impassive people because
passion exposes ourselves as assailable (a word that means

defenseless). That love unmasks us and that’s risky. But
essential. This past year, I’ve sat back, quit asking for anything.
Evan says that love lets you be greedy, allows you to grasp
what you need and keep it. That we can’t be cheap with each other.
Sometimes he tests me from behind the lens of the camera,

Tell me what terrifies you. Tell me who is most necessary for your
survival. If I fidget he’ll insist I’m not answering honestly. Replay
the tape to show me where my eyes shifted away from him.
Evan says that he doesn’t trust people who don’t take drugs,
since that signals an inability to surrender to someone else.

Even early civilizations built rituals around narcotics. I don’t see
what’s so ceremonial about Evan and his friend smoking pot
to play Vice City, what sort of emotional integrity gets celebrated
the nights he cuts a few lines so we can screw longer. But I’m young,
Evan says, lucky he’s patient. He wishes I’d just let him instruct me.

She serves me a piece of it a few minutes
out of the oven. A little steam rises
from the slits on top. Sugar and spice -
cinnamon - burned into the crust.
But she's wearing these dark glasses
in the kitchen at ten o'clock
in the morning - everything nice -
as she watches me break off
a piece, bring it to my mouth,
and blow on it. My daughter's kitchen,
in winter. I fork the pie in
and tell myself to stay out of it.
She says she loves him. No way
could it be worse.

Now there is a slit in the blue fabric of air.
His house spins faster. He holds down books,
chairs; his life and its objects fly upward:
vanishing black specks in the indifferent sky.

The sky is a torn piece of blue paper.
He tries to repair it, but the memory
of death is like paste on his fingers
and certain days stick like dead flies.

Say the sky goes back to being the sky
and the sun continues as always. Now,
knowing what you know, how can you not see
thin cracks in the fragile blue vaults of air.

My friend, what can I give you or darkness
lift from you but fragments of language,
fragments of blue sky. You had three
beautiful daughters and one has died.