Green squares of afternoon
crawl like beetles over the hills.

The wake is through the twig-rush
rising left of silver; I drop Mom

off at the door, park in the back
by an iron whale-mouthed trailer

where the extra chairs are pulled.
Above tightened black ties

old faces float and smile grimly.
Mom braces against the catafalque,

"he doesn't look like himself."
**** gives the speech, carries us all

through the expected meadows.
One cousin is glassy after downing shots

but his brother speaks for both.
Afterward, Mom can't walk well

so I get the sedan and take her home.
Slashes of slick sun wend through

the canopy like blood dripped
into beer - streaming out,

red threads entwining, suspended,
as the whole drink gets darker.

drywall graveyards
tacks stabbed through ghosts
buried and legible and moss-bearing

you never leave flowers
but you still remember; will
even with creasing palms of
papercuts and old printer ink

in a lot of ways you're still sliding across main street
graphite-stained and bleary
surrounded by cymbals
and freezing condensation
and pinpricks in your fingers

in a lot of ways you're still feeding her clementines,
her veins bic-blue and eyes alight
near clear with
spirits realer than you

in every way you're crumpled and jagged on the floor
the swaying kitchen table

you're talking to a fragment,
a figment handing you bottles to
burn your tongue and your throat and wait
for what?

for your self-portrait to dry once and for all;
for footsteps echoing down the stairs;
for long-decayed maple helicopters to activate;

for the dears to fall behind your bed and stay there

up until you are four feet tall
you think you're gonna be the next ****** mary;

every day you comb your hair with soap-dry fingers
and dress up like the sky.
you practice raising your hand and using it
to press the cumulonimbus waiting between your lips
gently down your throat;
you practice being clear;
you practice cursive till it's circuitry

at lunch, you fold airplanes with precision,
cover them in crayon script and
throw them toward the floaters
in your vision, past birches
and the pale afternoon moon.
your worst will dive to a floor stained with pizza grease;
your best will only sit indefinitely
on the reachless windowsill
of the school cafeteria

you and your best friend
practice getting married at recess,
gathering dandelions and buttercups into sloppy bouquets
till she gets stung by a bee
and is led inside through gray hallways.
you play statue on the grass in a dark green jumper
and look for white clovers while you wait for the bell

your third grade teacher has you
dressing 'venial sin' and 'mortal sin'
in lemon-scented ink that burns your lips
but not the page;
it makes you taste petrichor
writhing in your teeth, hear downpours
against the wild soil of your esophagus and cheeks,
and in a few years you'll try to bury your guilt
with acorns deep in that sandy ground

you're used to laying upside-down on your bed
wondering if jesus ever lied to mary and joseph
about climbing trees under bethlehem's star,
if he let their branches color
his books green, his hands purple.
you wonder if it's sinful
to scar notebooks how you do, how he did:
quiet, inhaling--

--

at five and a half feet tall, you still feel
like how jesus' notebooks probably weren't:

you allow the dots on your i's to dangle too far to the left,
your clothes and hair and sky to be scorched
by prism fragments and setting suns

and, sometimes, you let the clouds between your lips talk for you,
and, sometimes, every syllable is a promise from god after the flood

but sometimes you kneel in back pews
and recite a tenth hail mary
and think about whether she ever held a hand
that was stained yellow from the petals of palm-warmed flowers:

and sometimes you're blank again

It was hard to be wise....
You must eat change and endure
-Robinson Jeffers

Unzip this skin and see
your words impaled
on these tusks of heart:

curled myrtle wreathes hung
so pretty on a chamber door.
Look deeper - I am stuffed full

of your words, crushed up
like newspapers so they all fit,
the ink staining my fingers.

Unzip me and see them all
scattered like black poppy seeds,
like black ash on the wall

of the oven. You left them
all behind without asking,
left me too full of them.

I tried to tattoo over them,
I tried to ***** them out
with scotch (O how I tried

& tried and tried)
I tried to rake them away,
I held funerals for them

black wax candles, hex-moons,
but they never slept, and soon
they itched their way free.

Come get them -
you must be running out
of new things to say.

For Eddy Walker

I lost my mind today
for a couple hours

I laid there but not-there,
disconnected, wires downed,

half-thoughts slipping through teeth
the other half dying between my face

& the puckered ceiling's death kiss.
Uncle Eddy is parted from us,

this goodless, badless ball
hanging blue in black nothing:

sea-stained vacuum, clouded, waxy,
moon flicking round it like a moth,

even as we scream toward the great lamp -
No: pull back camera, rack focus:

this hush-centered city
dreams itself away at 2 am,

grease-legged streets, rivets of dust,
as we all sail on. I'm alone on M street,

on a mercy mission. I think of Eddy
in all of the basements he saved with story,

of his chuckled smile
& endless cigarette puppies.

Now the lung is empty:
song lyrics from another room,

can't make them out as Eddy handed me
a guitar with the hand not holding a beer.

I played into the crowd wall,
Eddy laughed, laughed in the corner.

I hold no high grievance
in my heart this morning:

not for the ex-wife combing
smoke signals from an outer reef

not for the crass jackhammer
breaking the city's black bones,

not for the fresh pink sky
that won't turn blue for me,

not for the dying elm leaf
that fell across my feet as I walked

over chilled rye grass, breaking
the breeze in two with my chest.

I. You Will Make A Name For Yourself

She said my name - it stuck there -
a jot of air caught in space between us -
it hung there, it's still hanging there,
moss growing over the truth of it,
rain chipping away at the crags,
my name waiting to be claimed.

II. Success And Wealth Are In Your Fate

There is a hill where I go walking
that is covered in grave slants -
headstones effaced by scraping snows -
money and marble sliding green and down -
so many dead hands bidding to shape
their fate - they're shushed by vines.

III. You Will Receive A Surprising Prize

In an open window across the street -
creamy unlidded eye in beige brick face -
a woman has showered and is toweling off
slowly and deliberately - almost burlesque -
as the sun cuts morning's cusp
in bright-grown slices - coming for her.