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.

we meet at midnight (or maybe one) and you’re wearing the same
hoodie you’ve been wearing for three years. the wind nudges us
apart but somehow still you’re soft and smiling. i don’t have a
scarf. there’s a snowball down my shirt and then there’s
this noise ripped from me like i’m gasping and
laughing at the same time and it’s the
ugliest noise i’ve ever heard. i try
to chase you but you’re faster
and it’s okay because
you and i both
have such
terrible
aim.

we’re both just glad to be alone.

there
are beds
i’ll never lie in
ever again and that
is for the best. i remember
there was a time i’d wait for you
i’d sit and literally gaze out my window,
see kids on bikes and the sun passing by
but never you till i conned the moon into friendship
and she introduced us. i’d start arguments to hear you talk
but sometimes (and only sometimes) i would breathe and think,
i wanna fall asleep standing on this salted sidewalk and never wanna
wake up. sometimes you look away when my lips move like you can’t
hear. but i follow you. i teach you to paint and you teach me to dance.

it’s always the same. we get inside. you
hand me bread. we sit on the couch.
i skin my knees falling to the ground
just to hear you laugh. you shift and a
part of me wants to know the rhyme or
reason why but you roll your eyes when
i tell you poetry doesn’t need to rhyme
and i am a happy hypocrite. the bottle
is warm where your hand's been killing
it. it’s dead when i hand it back.

when i fall asleep your eyes are with me
and when i wake up you’re holding my
wrists. my skin is petrichor and yours is
smoke. suddenly there’s thunder bridging
the distance between the moon and sun,
matchflame and cumulonimbus clouds
and the carpet flips over as i pitch toward
the kitchen table. you’re photokeratitis
and i go blind. i make snow angels.
i need. i need to close my eyes.

you make me tea. i put my head in my hands.
my hair frizzes under lightning. there are no
blankets and no conversation. i pretend
to sleep on the floor and in two long hours
i’ve made friends with the spiders under
your bed. you haven’t met.

--

the alarm whispers. i pick myself off his floor. i steady myself.
i can’t look at him for too long, can't say goodbye. i glance.
his eyes are closed. there’s no way to wake him without
feeling like a wolf, or maybe a sheep. my wrinkled coat
is tangled in the rug. it's dawn. red eyes. if he was up
he would call me a mess. he's not. the sun drapes
over his sheets. i am freezing. my hand shakes
at the doorknob and i think, wrong, this
is the ugliest noise i have ever heard.
the bottle is on its side next to him.
it says nothing. i never opened
a door more slowly. i run
like there’s something
behind me. i lose a
minute when i sit
on the stairs. my
my eyes bleed. i
laugh. i told him
i hate love songs.
it's not like he
follows my
*******
spotify.

it’s always morning here
and always so quiet;
it doesn't let me say goodbye.
he's asleep but i’m alone and the air
is still. there are no stormclouds,
no suns
or snow or crescent moons.

the sky is
blue

--iii of cups, reversed--


before i fall asleep
i watch you dance on the ceiling

neon blue and purple skies
silhouetting bodies
growing blurry and distorted by bass and
***** waters flowing out
waterfalls through straws flowing out
through me

crashing into the mattress uneven and seeping
a beat i reluctantly match

raising toasts to nothing
to last nights
and all the nights you’ll spend on airplanes and car rides
to states i’ll never travel

i go to sleep
and i watch you dance on the ceiling

***** waterfalls spilling endlessly from upturned glasses
seeping through my blanket


--the tower--


it’s a sigh when lightning strikes
and neon lights go out

it's easy
to light all my candles
and flicker east toward the window
curled and waved and cresting and silent
a thousand miles away from you

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

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

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.

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