Short poem

You, functional space
variants in voltage, the only light
Transitory effect of Love
several different lights
Sustain
Sustain them
you sustain them.

Because I am not married, I have the skin of an orange

that has spent its life in the dark. Inside the orange I am blind.
I cannot tell when a hand reaches in and breaks

the atoms of the blood. Sometimes a blackbird will bring the wind

into my hair. Or the yellow clouds falling on the cold floor
are animals fighting each other

out of their drifting misery. All the women I have known

have been ruined by fog and the deer crossing the field at night.

Darling, I leave you the forever unblooming
twig half-sunk in spring mud & the Nature that allows
such delicate & lasting atrocity.

Darling, darling, darling: my voice is a branch that would reach.

I leave you the ragged sky, once full of cloud & now
not. I leave you these things just as I leave

you: graceful passage from one something to the next.
Darling, even in this my voice dissipates

I wear my heart on my sleeve,
or rather both sleeves, since
it's usually broken.

Sometimes when I join my hands
to pray, the jagged edges
briefly touch,

like a plate that fell and cracked
apart from being asked
to hold too much.

Among other things,
thanks for explaining
how the generous death
of old trees
forms
the red powdered floor
of the forest.

We’re through, we’re through, we’re through, we’re through, we’re through

and — flanking, now, the edges of our schism —
it seems your coldness and my idealism
alone for all this time have kept us true.

Credulous I and hedonistic you:
opposed, refracting angles of a prism
who challenged sense with childish skepticism —
and every known the bulk of mankind knew.

Robbin, a bobbin, the big-bellied Ben,
He ate more meat than threescore men;
He ate a cow, he ate a calf,
He ate a butcher and a half;
He ate a church, he ate a steeple,
He ate the priest and all the people.

Jack Sprat could eat no fat.
His wife could eat no lean.
And so between them both, you see,
They licked the platter clean.