because the stream cuts me into paths every morning:
makes me shallow and deep, soft, jagged and drifting
and we all greet the crayfish in miller’s creek eventually:
become ships in the komorebi
become chips off of secret rock below the rusty pylon
on a hilltop, invisible, quietly
pinging signals to the strangers nextdoor from a raspberry bush

because we all become scarecrows, lost
in tomato vine towns
and red maple roots and branches
scared to disturb the dirt or the clouds

because sometimes the bats come out at dusk
to enrapture small ghosts that hang on wilted branches in the woods
climbing toward where the sun used to be

and i join them when that little river runs deep enough

Curious things emerge
from this last cup of gin.
Maybe I've been too alone
with the rain and with drink
because strangers converge
into thumb-smudged skins
washing over smoothed stone
into the storm's glottal rink...
I'll stop there and stem
these mannequin thoughts
seeded by a dollar's solitude,
watered by a fallen hem
of night. Thunder's brought
a brand new mood...

i never met my grandfather till today--

he dies in 1975
and today he was born
at the bottom of a drawer in the kitchen,
his coffin and crib:
he is swaddled in moth-eaten dishtowels
by a nameless undertaker
or perhaps the autophagic author himself

his crib and coffin:
he was buried a lifetime,
deaf to my own cacophonous et cetera

amidst cardboard boxes
he arises, stretches
and sits on our couch, transparent and whispering
his earliest recollections in ink from distant trenches:
he eats sliced-up milky way bars,
listens to little orphan annie and the manhattan rainstorms
as they flood his empty pillowcase;

my earliest recollection is a blank notebook,
never happened,
didn’t fall from the sky till three-quarters of a century later
in drops of impossible invisible ink

in 1934 i smell decades-old storms
and tobacco smoked by children;
today he tastes dough
from hands of women he could have loved

we break toys, apologize to our ghosts
listen to drops on macadam phantoms.

we think tonight was cloudy.

we left identical sleigh tracks in identical snow
laughed identical laughs whose echoes and imprints
are separated only by city and by many, many newspapers.

we remembered the same sun,
the same rain and lightning

and we both wrote that we may be heard
over the century’s thunder
but stopped, hid, tired, retired—

shaking hands
halfway to tomorrow,
never touching—

two strange strangers
left sleepless and motionless in the same notebooks,
the same house:
in the same cradles and the same coffins.

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

because she’s still wearing her diamond earrings
and they still bloom
reflections in flour-coated sunsets
in pre-dawned hospital windows at dusk and beyond
they don’t come off
obtrusive and quiet and every spark
bright where her eyes haven’t been
lately she’s not all there so i should be
holding on tightly

because her hands are battlefields
her eyes are blizzards
and she ate half a scoop of strawberry ice cream
just last week it was just the other day
she said my name

because i can see every jolt
her heart now beats
tsunamis that slam her ribcage and there’s no higher ground

because she still sits up in bed head in palms
and asks what day it is like the churches aren’t shut
like her hallways aren’t gathering dust

because when she sleeps she dreams of a lovely ghost
with a shovel and pre-technicolor dirt on his cheeks
and he wants to be with her again

because when she wakes
she wonders before
she remembers
she forgot

because we remember we sit in the living room
we flood our eyes with laughter
and dead lambs and fish and loaves of bread and wooden spoons
and chicken cordon bleu
and i want her to hear and taste and see and smile
again against homemade wine the singing in summer the accordions i never got to hear

because she still asks me what i ate for dinner(though it’s only lunchtime)
and until she can no longer speak--

i get lost on purpose
    drive into the mountains like
    maybe i’m waiting for a cliff

   like maybe route 44 will go off the grid
    unmap itself
from my neurons and from google both

i brake disgusted
    reminded of the guy who took the hairpin too fast
    and didn’t even make a dent in the ridge
reminded how it looms so large with every rev
    till all i see is rock
   , road
   , and impossibly the flightiest glimpse of

   vanishing point

so distant from the guy who escaped the sky

i pull over next to smoking trucks and their smoking drivers
silhouetted against a valley so vast it may as well be nothing
    a pipedream projected somewhere
    beyond
     some etching from the silurian period
    that i won’t understand (not even when i’m older)

i’m sorry i’m late

i get lost on purpose
    but i still repeat myself:
the second the county signs change color
    i’m shivering at the lookout
    i'm swinging around and glancing nervously at the sun
i'm slamming my brakes at the hairpin
    neither earth nor air nor new
   just home.

sorry i’m late
but i’m here.
    i parked at the end of the driveway
   like always.

i.

must be nice being a live-in crypt-keeper

lounging on stones till they fall over
keeping the grass warm for ‘em


ii.

i sip my juice glass of box wine

i make eye contact with the deer, freezing

a woman feeds them breadcrumbs from her car around noon
and they all saunter over

gods examining their offerings
on an altar in the mausoleum parking lot

when the sun sets, they approach loose dirt and chew
on the marigolds some suckers planted
in fits of poetic reverent irony
and i watch them(and i know they hate the taste
or i bite my cheek and know they’re supposed to)


iii.

i always wanted to live in a crypt

stained glass concrete windows
and little kids wondering what might be inside
like the doors to dracula’s castle
too distant for curious fists to reach

no wi-fi no hi-byes
no glowing screens
or angry yellow eyes through dusty curtains
and no need to save my neighbors’ numbers

or pretend the empty apple tree don’t bother me


iv.

after a while
meeting people who think they’re immortal stops being funny

like a joke you tell a thousand times
till you realize no one’s laughing
or the birthday card in the dust below your bed
that you now force to live on your wall

maybe i’ve lived here too long

because i used to climb that apple tree
just like she climbed a cherry tree in italy
just like the poor talented ghost who one day became it

but one by one we all swung down
and now none of us know what season it is,
just that it’s colder than it was when we first stepped off the grass
on a rainy day in april

because the deer don’t come near me anymore

they know i’m always empty-handed,
always hear my shivering bones approaching
when they fall asleep laying on her chest


v.

i stay awake, surrounded
at the kitchen table,
heating up the meatballs we found in her freezer
and sipping box wine with one ice cube ringing against the glass
a couple blocks away