As with this Jet Ski family
braiding the lake
with bigger and bigger shocks
until the one
car-sized one
cuts his engine
and, following him, for an instant
they all coast
through silences
of self-made
rain —
how much is required now
to carve,
out of the general
livable quiet,
independence?
Off rows of windshields
in the Amtrak lot
rain in sudden
clumps like jacks. Parked cars
with people in them
awaiting people they imagine
hurtling through suburbs
of silver woods
awaiting them. True
love needs interference,
a certain blizzard distance,
for the words to worm through.
Remember Iowa?
August storms that would self-spark
as if our fights could trip
the finest wire beneath the sidewalk.
And the sunlight, harder after.
By new names
and then no names
at all, their laws
will reach your land,
Lorine, to feed
on your much loved
marshy spaces
whose occasional faces
discern a stranger
from far off
but like to take
a break from well
or welding just
to talk. We can-
not extricate
a place from those
it’ s made of, the sounds
it makes. But now
from Blackhawk
Island to Madison
to Washington,
geologies
thin; more things
sound or work
As anyone
is apt to, you began as someone
else’ s symptom. As in
other beginnings: drawn lots, blood,
some dancing on the heads of pins
and inside needles’ eyes,
cellular revelry,
hopping
of microscopic
turnstiles. Lucky guest,
grist, leapt
long odds to spark
the tinder in the dark.
Then, the subcommittees met:
made merry in duplicate, triplicate
and so on, much of themselves, divided
and divined and concurred.
All sides insides, pre-ambulatory
perambulation meant: sure
If by truth you mean hand then yes
I hold to be self-evident and hold you in the highest —
ko to my ot and bait to my switch, I crown
you one-trick pony to my one-horse town,
dub you my one-stop shopping, my space heater,
juke joint, tourist trap, my peep show, my meter reader,
you best batteries-not-included baring all or
nothing. Let me begin by saying if he hollers,
end with goes the weasel. In between,
cream filling. Get over it, meaning, the moon.
Tell me you’ ll dismember this night forever,
Some people might describe this room as spare:
a bedside table and an ashtray and an antique
chair; a mattress and a coffee mug;
an unwashed cotton blanket and a rug
my mother used to own. I used to have
a phone. I used to have another
room, a bigger broom, a wetter sponge.
I used to water my bouquet
of paper clips and empty pens, of things
I thought I’ d want to say if given chance;
but now, to live, to sit somehow, to watch
a particle of thought dote on the dust
Another dead mare waits
in the shoals of some body
of water, waits to be burden,
borne into a foaming ocean,
where it might become food
for whales, or, simply empty
signifier — hair latched to the sea’ s undulation
like Absalom’ s beauty
caught in the playful branches
I
And at the picnic table under the ancient elms,
one of my parents turned to me and said:
“We hope you end up here,”
where the shade relieves the light, where we sit
in some beneficence — and I felt the shape of the finite
after my ether life: the ratio, in all dappling,
of dark to bright; and yet how brief my stay would be
under the trees, because the voice I’ d heard
could not cradle me, could no longer keep me
in greenery; and I would have to say good-bye
again, make my way across the white
I wait for my shadow to forget me,
to take that one phantom step that I keep
from taking. I wait for the simple flash
of a dancer's spat upon this one moon
of stage-light, the mind's lonely oval
illuminated on the surface of some
windless pond or slew. And the old soft-shoe
practices to get it right, husha-husha-hush
in its constant audition of sawdust.
Even this choreography of useless
wishing is not enough to keep tonight
from becoming nothing more than some floor's
forgotten routine where faded, numbered
