she watches the woman water
potted plants on the stoop
in the pouring rain

an indoor ghost garden leaves traces
on the ceiling / an enclosed atrium
aches for its missing awe

a preserved moss wall
in any color merely represents
never reveals the true river

will it stop / it doesn’t stop
Lola on the Lake from burning
to the ground / Tin Fish phantom

from another wet spring
a bite grabbed / he brought the dog
one more walk around the lake

some histories too burdened with slag
are not worth rescuing
from the flood

he will know when
she finds relief
stops blaming
the sky
stands beneath
his favorite ash
and laughs
at the sight
of all
those carvings
exposing them
she knows now
trees prefer
a gentle touch
without risk
of tattoo

Illegible scrawl creates a collision
on a freakishly cold, rainy morning
in mid-May.

She wears a knit cap. Tree pollen
ruins her for anyone
who crosses this crooked line.

Nothing against those blooming
northern pin oaks. Misery clears
an unwanted swath

through an urban forest
of steet signs and boulevard droops.
How did she get from tree

lawn to boulevard? By way of berm
to hellstrip to swale to snow shelf
on the verge of bursting forth

along a line of maidenhair trees,
dewy green blades might reply.

Extreme weather cleaves another
station where she might have met you
during a calmer time.

A crawler reaches for the sky
so that vegetables with dirt on them
might take us the rest of the way.

In this version, she retreats
from guitar strums,
the plaintive crack
of a worn voice,
to write a letter
to her 27-year-old self:

How many babies won’t you have?
How long will you stay
in one place?

A voice in some messier version
gives her permission
to let the questions dangle
precariously from her lower lip.
Whispers from another river
elevate her view

of all that high water danger.
She wants to release it
to a more natural shape and flow.

Another version
will emerge truer
with more nuanced
section cuts
in an even darker ink,
if she can wait
just a little longer.

she keeps coming to you
in a dream fog
to show you where

the streetcars used to run
around a sharp bend
the hill so much steeper

in the slumbering mind
you know she’s wrong
you remember those tracks

mapping a different route
on another street / neither of you
alive when buses replaced trams

in another city
in another state
in another dream

you ride the Rapid
downtown / it will remain
the Terminal Tower

in your mind / dare you say heart / she nods when you laugh at yourself
all the protesting

may have been valid
but the crooked river
is slowly being set free

first it’s snow
in the forecast
to terrorize the brand new buds

that arrived
on tree branches overnight

then it’s a thunderstorm
then occasional rain
then this cloudy and cool

the last Saturday in April
not so cruel

the cyclist run over
by a produce truck
will survive

a luthier picks through
the city’s old bones

to make his next move
May will come to
in tune

margin

I don’t know if
the bees will
rise again.

What if
I give up
the pen—

dump all
I’ve captured
into a two-minute iMovie.

Photographers are thieves
like us. We steal
bodies to reframe

and remind us
of all we cannot know
like those bees

that can shake
pollen off
a flower’s anthers.

As a high rising terminal
climbs up the left margin,
a vocal fry slides down the right.

This is a monotone—
my mantra to the edge
where I wait

for the city and the sea
to bleed

into each other. My wings
beat so much faster
than either of us predicted.

This poem is a train,
this stanza
a station.

Express through
the next

into another
Good Friday
waiting for the bees.

This one’s not going to Rome.
We can open the window
against the night.