Poetry

In the evenings, we watched Jeopardy. 
Wore surgical masks once she got sick.
Before that my mother sent me to the store
for cigarettes all the time. Pack of Salem Lights.

Of birdsongs, I know only three
for certain: cardinal, blue jay, raven,
though perhaps the last two
don’t count—not as song. More call
than song.  More cry, by which I mean

I wore the face of the animal to lure the animal into shooting range.

This was symmetry. 

I want my web to hold. I want to repair
what I have made. I was not given the gold hive.
In me seethes the silk of invisible worlds. Spinning
my body inside of hairline emptiness, I project

       in the bathroom, a sticker on the hot-water tank 
 says, It only takes one or two 

seconds to become 
 helpless in flowing grain, or among flowering graves, 
            down where the boats are being unloaded. 
   It happens so swift...

   It frogs in from the front and fails.
   Concentric broadcasts summit the senses
       and slide the faculty a sleeping pill.

    shortened are the number of times 
I will speak to my father alive
 the days I can just goof off and no one cares 

I did this to myself, I know. You are not mine
but come as wind clotted with the end of a season. 
Did you know all a ginkgo’s leaves fall on the same day? 
Sometimes it’s called maiden hair. For its beauty. 

Two tree-limb-switched heretics born of Baptist parents, we reveled in a Ouija. But the only black spirits we conjured were our own shadows which flickered against the wall like a private screening. Both of us church boys sweltered in June...

The last time I left your house I saw a moth 
on the black skin of a puddle, ruining herself 
on the moon’s reflection. Dear sphinx hawkmoth