If I could
print you
a new hand
to hold
mine, I would
still walk alone
up this hill. You would
rescue a baby
squirrel falling
from bare branches,
and the day
would become salvage.
If I could
print you
a new hand
to hold
mine, I would
still walk alone
up this hill. You would
rescue a baby
squirrel falling
from bare branches,
and the day
would become salvage.
From the street,
she sees a hammock affixed
to some bare
elms in a city
park. A how to live
in urban green before
it greens. Bad
poetry never makes good
architecture. Good
architecture makes good
poetry if
the intentional flaw
doesn’t compromise
the structure. She wonders
how tight
those knots are tied.
The invisible
line between
walking and running
talking and singing
touching and pressuring
scent and stench
breeze and gust
sleeping and dying
to live is
lift off.
In Lagos, Portugal.
She thought she was so
adult to be
drinking alone
with Ms. Sarton
still alive in a foreign country.
28 years ago
this August, she hasn’t been
back. No longer goes
to bars with or without
May. There was a bartender
in that story—but not this poem.
Here is
my note to self
to remember to soar
just a little more gracefully
each day.
Dare to
schedule a massage,
board a train
headed east, look
up while passing beneath
a balcony, remember
who she hitchhiked with
the last time
she did it—dared
to be
so young, that is.
Sometimes it snows
in April. Sometimes
it’s too soon
for any new
life to begin. Better
before anything stirs. Better
to be an addendum
to winter than a mutation
to spring.