Every Jet You Watch Cross the Sky Is Me Leaving
Lanterns follow the footpath
Briefly then dwindle
Acorns rattle their hard questions
In this hour naked with fog you find me
Difficult to hoard
Tossed into last night’s fountain
I glister at the bottom
My kimono of oak leaves
Coals underwater
If Not the Bliss We Were Promised
If stars sing in our blood of trace metals
If atomic clocks rely on excitation
Sap rising up sugar maples
How many winters of white sleep
I awaited that arrival
If our fingertips house a hundred nerves
Each lit with alchemical fire
Name my race dust name me void’s daughter
If half-dead I just kept choosing
Light frozen to a solid
What else could it be this brilliant
Pane the fly is drawn to
Once I No Longer Lived Here
Even the songbirds excised my name
Bowdlerized, blacked out of snapshots
Now voyager sail thou forth
I became a unicorn of legend
Bridled with roses, had I ever
Slept here domestic
Writ my will upon moving water
Archives expunged
Mealtimes carried on without me
Sawn in half, a trick I’d perfected
Doffing my top hat of aces and doves
Cabinets gaping off
Hinges, music dead-stopped, every chair taken
True as a turnstile
I had left them
Not a flicker of wind to trouble the candles