RECESS
Flattened stone floor, covered
in wooden slats, the portico
with columns and even arches,
not exactly the porch
the other house (our same floor
plan doubled into something else)
had across our common grass.
Theirs raised above ground where
girls sit outside-inside or inside-outside,
when their window, used as a door, is left open.
All you can see is an opaque double window
with legs, feet, and standing below.
A hill behind. Often, an older couple walks,
just a little lower. You can tell by the sound.
Where the lawn tilts seems to pause.
They unclip the leashes of their two huskies.
Wind sounds against
what it clings to, clinging back.
Disappearing beneath the hill
transmitting a noise that was nothing insignificant,
the couple walks every day, their huskies, and gradually.
House open, close. Some houses open
from common room to Common’s Lawn.
A purely linear approach, walking
from one house to another.
Followed when not to be, you asked.
Walking the same way over,
stepping back into marks,
to outside your house from another inside.
To the house with its porch and its swing,
allowed to return and never do you are told
you are and never do.
Still you sit. Will you, it was of me asked,
under a canopy, under the hill, the small stone thrown to me
rested on the porch canopy.
Under the hill, I was just a little lower than visible.
PORTENT
They can’t keep to themselves.
Two stacked squares of photos
inadvertently make a star.
Filled with my father,
one contains
his pictured eye
I poked through.
Our family squared
around a table.
A plate almost
empty but for a speck.
Fluorescent bulbs, uncovered.
Covered my hand in someone’s
hand under the table. Beige slivers
of bread. This has happened
before; my hand playing
in someone. Punctured hole
in print where I tried.
These stars can all be undone.
I’m eluding the darkest room
in search of a thing.
In the tilted way he reached
across to give away his hand, not
knowing he would never get it back,
he built the post he bound himself to
and can never leave.
EMPIRE OF LIGHT
The appearance only described while beneath
(as if a congregation would watch
after me) a veil, each piece too thin
to conceal the next, face as thin and still,
in terms of a cloud: stratiform. Listening carefully
at the edge to it, a door on either side, noises
where I fit my fingers to the wall
keeping me up as I lean forward, closing eyes,
head to its edge, colors back rushing.
Separating subtly from the dense . . .
I was not ready. To ready myself
was to underdress, I did (faithfully)
slowly, successfully evoke
a woman I was not. For in front
of the mirror, a person’s asking for it.
Says let us marry, kissing the mirror.
I kiss the mirror and my house behind
me and all my personal interests.
In night and day, it does the same.
Could I be intricately more involved in me
than in another? I think of you between
the days, I say to me. And again.
There is no satisfaction in it,
life held together by occasions.
AN ARRIVAL
The outline of a young girl’s head,
adjusting her chin, smudging,
in the house she walks with a thrown
position, lean frozen and still,
a gesture that only makes sense
if she is moving, so she is.
She appears to nod.
So you are, seeing
two mirrors
(that way you look this way)
across the room from each other,
growing progressively darker
into invisibility
long before the infinite.
It’s the suggestion
of infinity—not infinity actually.
Did you believe
in a specific far away?
MUSE UPON THE FLOOR
You cannot see a lock in the shadow of a door,
it has a chain latch too;
I cannot see, even a little.
As the door outside pushes open
a little,
I can only touch it back from the inside,
causing delay, some.
A familiar movement,
a shadow casting a long one of itself,
longer.
MUSE UPON THE FLOOR
The French-seam pillowcase I made,
in a row of pillows, goes unnoticed, as it should.
Do you like the floors? Covered in reversed shirts, socks.
The light is good in here today,
window unlocked and open, still, without wind.
Irritated, I have no preference
for you being here,
like when you waved to
the person I stood in front of
then pretended later
it was me the whole time,
your gaze aimless
front facing.
Was there a glass you could see
your own face in behind me?
MUSE UPON THE FLOOR
When a man gets caught, he let himself,
slatted by standing in front of the blinds.
Won’t you identify the body you are in?
Each of us sees on the wall
a little textured spot,
taped seams where sheets
of drywall meet other imperfections.
Where my face had stirred,
I caught myself
seeing what
I caught myself seeing.
MUSE UPON THE FLOOR
The bedroom door,
a chain latch done up by you, again
with your preference for me skewed,
closes (its very short screws easily rip).
When a fleck of dust
or has that split in the wall always been there
appears to me
what cannot be ignored any longer
gets remembered in pieces
though most is missing clearly.
MUSE UPON THE FLOOR
Familiarly, your knuckles tap the door
one night, another.
Wrapped by a cloth
wound round the lamp,
so only seen through the slatted blinds
an orange hue, not you.
Folding a hard curtain up,
traces of a squashed wasp still perfectly visible behind it
on the window.
Not you
but a foot approaching.
Not the shadow of it but seemingly more of you
a bit of you, come in.