MEASURING THE GOAT
A trench of barkless trees. Slim black sweater
arched like a claw. Thimbles of the heart and spine
overflown. The halfway trucks, the drivers inside
dislodge wax from their bodies to the tune of a pulverizing
sun streak. Up toward Ohio, geometry for the pupils
to control light. I treat the shoulder as range,
solace as a belt. Good parts think about happening
when I forget my place in the year. Winter is tomb.
Spring is a sage-dappled switchboard. Iridescent ballots
cling to the underside of the changing panel, a dock
curdling at touch. I am an amateur
winter. The pinion tempered toward a fist
first waking. From the prolific moon, several species
transpire and penetrate the gilded navy ledge
surrounding the glint of farmer’s tools. Summer
is a truant flautist. Fall is Douglas fir stilts. They part
from the ground like practical flowers. Refrigerators
humming drowsily throughout. In human fashion, I strangled
the thing I saw shaped like love. Entering the eye
with a nail and a coat, recursing the unmanaged
graves. The days have roofs. Vision is almost whole.
PLAYING HOUSE
Look at the air on the surface
Fish singing from second story windows
You love me so much your clothes smell like my clothes
A borrowed sun is maneuvering
Around steel poles
Toward the boy’s chest
For him the bus is not on time
Waste is a comfortable distance
You forgive with an Easter basket
Let a single dinner spaghetto drop
From a chin the boy does not mimic
The cat laughs between sips
Milk with its eyes closed
I hear the narrowing of cement
In the small dark loops before sleep
You know he only meant to be urgent
One little hand twinkling with guilt
From the cul-de-sac where we emerge
THE OTHER SVETLANA
Nothing is a sooner errand than night
As it moderates the clean and holey
Population signals
Too complicit and limber to articulate the other
Side of personality’s long glance
Curving beyond the eager and inconsolable
Laundromat. We file out from
Each dusk like beautiful countries
Looking upward to the ruptured myth
Of north. One such example is nature
And nature’s zombie, another resurfacing
Ice climbing a future woman.
The way a broom makes a home deliberately
Out of view and over time becomes
Notorious for the big frogged skirt
Sun leaves where available. I trust my barbed
Wired, girlish righteousness
To do the job inexplicably: the eggs dry on the house and no one
Puts their foot in this grave: it’s not “their” grave: tell them
Before the red sock turns loose like eugenics for salmon
Lamenting closets. In time
We are all the prime suspect
In our continuing lives, where the sweet hats swim
And love like a drained alphabet boxes
More tired than often. This is the skyscraper
Or two intended from the beginning, only now and then
Flitting in covertly as resurrected meal tickets.
The trouble is did I say it. The real
Porchlight people split a plane
Like white wide swords digging benignly
Through a pre-flattened hearth. Sometimes God is like my name
For the culprits we haven’t named, or, sorry, the other
Svetlana.
PUNCTUAL FROLIC
A hole in the child’s arm clicking God talks from outside
The voice stores itself in hinges
In that backyard, little birds pace after a heavy chest
with white latches
The songs all pretend to be corporeal
and have legs have a time that recasts
with the windows opening
Pine needles squirm on their branch and are
falling on skin and earth, intimate, close to people
The romp so true oh, car lot balloons
I try to put my face inside
Fruits I know I love standing still
Usually, while the sun makes them a headband
The children’s names fail but a hill, a visible fire
in a coatroom not listening
What’s happening to the old way to fly
PROOF
Here’s a true song about the water in the moon
boiling: the boys you want to be
caught mid-gathering on your chest
while you sleep.
An imaginary person is a real person multiplied
by the imaginary unit I
Jack says so. Properly nourished, he can make a drum
kit out of a duckling. Give it a try—
he hands anyone the calipers.
Sometimes haphazard, sometimes blond
as a Post-it, that your fear of something bothers it
to exist, nags you in the place between
the front step and the heart.
Here’s a mathematical study of beauty: only so
because we watch it melt. The joy
of building up to an empty house.
News makes a sound like a wristwatch
ready to expand. Oh, so this is love, what you had
not thought of on your own, a wet daisy
ruins the paint, and the people—when they appear
they do not touch the ground.
AFTERNOON PAPERS
Words want to fatten, the background
Wants to prod the suburbs
Squares in sizes, laminated sepia
Before, a girl famed for bird impressions
The uncertain touch is gentler than meaning
To touch gently
Heads on a power line see less sky than this
Storks are maturing
Very fine yarn I’ve made a new creature of
Like a music note
It has wings and pulp
Strung out, hot as a hearth, black and white
The road when called
Bolts ahead of you
Shoes are birds too
The sun is a sundry of suns so that nothing is still
Second to second, though you wouldn’t dare guess
Each day brings a child and they know the news