Poetry

we love them too much 
to see them—

No, not insurance. What I
meant to say was “double identity,”

as in Boutros Boutros-Ghali,
William Carlos Williams, Sirhan Sirhan,

my son breathes to leave me
to leave the lean-to
of family: extended and penal 

She kept putting off sending him the book,
then one afternoon she recognized 
the author walking up Fifth Avenue

One night, she turns the novel’s last page. This is all—
small house, plain street, some trees, sweet and irksome neighbors, dishes, bills, water leaks, 

Nervous, twigs split, become swallows, 
jeté the platinum poring chits

over horizon’s bistered tinge.
Is a murderer secreted in us all,

Unmarried, the heart ejaculates
what it must, scarlet-purled, arterial,

away, away. Or conversely, married,
it requires all—venous, freighted with wastes.

Two seats away, my father watched
the tenor study the world that rumbled
parallel to his window: crumbling

The woman saves every heart- or wing-
shaped rock she finds, studding the mountain 

To protect the instrument, she spent all night
gesturing at plates or nodding yes to the glass of white.