Each time I see you
I start talking
about my dead father.

It’s the day he died
two years ago.
It’s the day he was born

79 years ago.
It’s my birthday.
Why do I tell you that?

We’re lucky
to have lived this long.
You recognize my face—that’s all.

Or it’s some other woman’s face
you see in mine. Do you see
mine in hers?

I’m not much better.
I remember a seam
that divides your torso,

the waves crashing
in on themselves,
you swimming out and out and out.

But the words escape
down a pipe

into the Lethe.
I’ve got nothing.
I look for seam rippers

on the uptown F train.
I’m not really that violent
with my passion.

She wants to ask
but fears a stranger’s ridicule.
A boldfaced truth
rarely dominates
the way those lying bastards
in the center aisle do.

She’s one. Became a bastard
by age 12. A marriage made null
and void. To ask why
bastardize a child
is to carry around
an irresistible urge to disappear

without a desire
for the cure.
She’s no angel.

It’s no longer about repairing
wings. An atheistic spirituality
wraps around her shoulders tightly
to brace her for another polar vortex.
That Coriolis force
will never change

the direction her words drain
through a basin
into the pipe that leaks
into the Lethe.
The rehabilitation will require
no feathers.

“What would a person be searching for
outside in this kind of weather except death?”
—Jon Kalman Stefansson (untitled poem)

In the penultimate hour
she looks for Cate Blanchett
in a mirrored hallway.
She tells no one.
It would ruin
the effect. It would ruin

the shape of the loop—
the many loops

she has held down
with her left boot. No loop
can be so constrained.
A sash could wreck her life.
An oversized red silk one
could, in fact, kill her

instantly. But a loop
will not strangle or be strangled.

Illegible laughter
brims to the surface
of her hot pink throat.
A slow-motion pigeon
distracts her from a thief
who would steal

her dreams. She dreams
of Martha Graham.

It means nothing.
A bleeding purple cabbage
reminds her of that first
adolescent kiss
in a closet
behind a milk crate

filled with leather and silk
belts and cuffs.

To be a skald in a taxi that races past
an Uber vehicle
on a deserted highway.
To be reminded of that feeling—
how death digs into her chest
like a burrowing insect.

To be so alive
when her father has been gone for years.

To take a single drumstick
from a hinged case
to make a sapling
without a sound.

To be a malediction
that won’t stick

and a tiny black speck
on the far screen
is to be the one
who stands up
before the train stops
at the next (to last) station.

Slush wins
over black ice
or snow or hail or mist
or lust for numbers that don’t line
the clouds.

She finds herself
running along the wrong side
of the fence.

A seemingly endless
chain-link barrier
keeps her in the muck

and mire
and dog shit—
and make no mistake

this is
a wall.

When your worst nightmare
comes true and your nasty woman shouts
boomerang back to your ears
as muzzled ghost moans.

When flashbacks
to a highschool date rape
before date rape existed
and a stranger on a bicycle
who sexually molested you in the middle
of the sacred act of running
wreck the few moments of sleep
you try to catch.

When you feel yourself losing
the battle to avoid placing blame
and your city girl soul wants
to [#%$&#%#]
the spirit of [%#$&#%]

When you wonder if the pendulum
really will swing back again,
and if it does, how many otherized
victims will be bludgeoned
in the wake of its arc.

When the date November 9, 2016,
scrolls across the screen
and can only be read upside down
and it gives you vertigo to try.

When, then, now
you hope for a miracle—
to keep your mind open wide,
your heart open wider.

“Like a bird on a wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.”
—Leonard Cohen, “Bird on a Wire”

A poet
loves the
songwriter. A
songwriter doesn’t
love the
poet back.

Her speaking voice carries
loudly through half-bare branches
of trees that won’t give it all up yet.

His handwriting
is only
half legible.
The words
slant to
the left

before reaching a perfectly
perpendicular rhythm as the stone wall
blocks the light.

No box
of mirrors
will rescue
the colors
lost inside
his song.

She doesn’t want to trap him
into seeing her. He saw her
once but got drunk

a decade later. Now
the poem needs a door
to lean against.

It’s the singer who discovers
the gap they have tried
so hard to conceal.

To hide in a hollow,
holler, or rabbit hole

To fear
the widening horizon

To admit to being
a little bit mad without shame

To believe in the inverted
negative view more

To speak slowly
with an ice-blue-eyed stare

To crave the texture of a black pebble
wall to lean against

and a nubbed rouge rug
beneath bare feet

To open a book
without pictures or conversations

To love the promise
and terror of the blank page

To be too early to everything
and too late to fix it

To go on like this
ad infinitum

is to lap herself
without apology or regret

The week of future tense
will gain momentum midway
through longer journeys
along trails with spurs.

It will bring stronger winds
and trees shedding
their warmer colors.
There will be night sweats.

She will acknowledge
the colder rain outside
with a cool gray voice inside.
She will use her words

to promote a stranger’s
single-line diagram
as the secret map
that will guide us to exit

this broken rhythm—
vowells to be discarded
along the breakdown lane.

It started
as a barely audible rumble.
Slowly it grew
till a voice projected
through a megaphone
hollered in the darkness:

Black and white
were shades of gray first.
Tin tile ceilings
came before aluminum siding.
64 was a perfect cube
before it got waxed.