poetic bits

...Was moon-shaped helmet left In bog, was condition Of a spirit shorn, childlike & herd. Was Andalusian, ambsace, Bird. Am kept. Was keeper of the badly marred, was furious done god, was Patient, was bad Luck, was nurse.

Extinguish me from this. I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost And flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia, Blinking in the swarm of it...

Wanting is reposed and plump   As the hands of a Romanov child Folded in the doeskin sashes of her lap,   Paused before the little war begins...

We are two clouds glistening in the bottle glass. We are two birds washing in the same mirror.

You lie in our bed as if an orchard were over us. You are what’s fallen from those fatal boughs. Where will we go when they send us away from here?

Snow: years of anger following hours that float idly down —

...I don’t believe in an afterlife, she says. But after K. died, I thought I might go after her.                 In case I’m wrong. In case she’s somewhere. Waiting.

...Tonight, while walking to the car, I said your name to the evening star, clearly pronouncing the syllables to see your name dissipate in the air, evaporate. Only the night air carries your words up to the dead (the ancients wrote): I watched them rise, become remote.

Dazzling emptiness of the black green end of summer no one running in the yard pulse pulse the absence...

The hinge of the year the great gates opening and then slowly slowly closing on us. I always imagine those gates hanging over the ocean fiery over the stone grey waters of evening. We cast what we must change about ourselves onto the waters flowing to the sea. The sins, errors, bad habits, whatever you call them, dissolve...