“Forgetting is the purest form of clarity.”
--Someone

And so ended the unquiet dreams
awkward reunions with the dead
wandering the halls of sleep,
the bodies of others’ loss.
Ghosts gone from the gazebo.
No laments in the lowering sun.

She woke. Blue sky blinked into her eyes.  
The room’s climate began to clear.
The familiar path from bed to door
curled into a stone staircase.
When did that get there?  
There was writing on the wall
near a waterfall.

She climbed. She soared.  
She leant a myth to god.
She stood in a garden with five black stones.
She foretold an eclipse,
Burned the witch of winter,
Stepped in the same river twice.

The moon shrank into the alarm clock’s face.
Her breath brewed clouds above her forehead.
She sat aloof in the empty air,
Alone in the immense morning,
At rest in clear, cold perfection.

1.  Learn forgiveness.  Then withhold it from everyone.
2. Avoid making enemies. Leave it to your friends to find you insufferable.
3. There is good in everyone. The trick is not to let it out.
4. Expect the worst. You’ll be right.
5. Never hurt anyone’s feelings.  Unintentionally.
6. Command an audience.  Then who cares if you loathe mankind?
7. Self-sacrifice ennobles the spirit.  But someone still has to clean up the blood.
8. Don’t dance.  Then no one will watch.
9. Don’t envy others’ success.  Intervene more forcefully to prevent it.
10. Life is short, but otherwise lousy.

A butterfly landed nearby.
It had auburn wings
and azure circles on each,
like a pair of eyes
that looked through me.

“Butterfly, you are beautiful!” I cried.
“You give me pleasure.
I love you.”

“Love is a beautiful thing,” said the butterfly.
“I need food. You have flowers.
Can I drink from them?”

“Of course,” I said.  
“But aren’t you going to love me back?
I am a butterfly just like you.
Tell me that you see it!”

“Nothing that I say,”
she said, “can make you a butterfly.”
“If you want to be a butterfly,
be one.”

1
To suspend
A summer day in glass.
Complaisant green,
This blade of grass.

2
To give away
Grief, unfeel a caress,
Nourish a hunger
For emptiness.

3
To insinuate
to love’s unanswered skin
syllables of desire
pricking in.

4
To build
a terrace of form,
inside the weather of confusion,
a private storm.

5
To wander
through rooms of the mind
searching for enchanted objects.
What do I have to find?

6
To mark
against the slippage
of another year
that we are here.

Last year's version of the mind-body problem:
my mind gives orders that my body won’t obey.
It’s a problem.

The body’s warranty has expired and
spare parts are scarce.  Plastic tubes
To help me drain have become part of my day.
So there’s still a will.  But sometimes no way.

I am now my sister’s age when she died.  
And some nights
as I lie down in darkness
there’s a moment of wondering
could this be the night
of the Great Reckoning
when everything I’ve said and done
goes mute and I am gone.

And crawling over me like a slow stain
is dread that everything important in life
has already happened. I remember some days  
less than my dreams.

But friend, not this tone!
Let us write a history of now.
Body and soul, stand up and shout
“Baseball road trip!”

Car:  check.  Best friend:  check.  Nostalgia for a simpler
time.  We can fake that one.
The red zigzags on our map turn into places:
Six ballparks in a week.
Detroit haze, gasping Chicago wind,
Milwaukee self-serve micro brew
Cincinnati chili and watering eyes,
Cleveland’s defiant self-love,
Pittsburgh’s Primanti brothers monstrosity sandwich—
Burger, coleslaw, and fries on toast.

The American dream tastes like fast food,
But the mystery lives between the lines.
Thwack of fastball into catcher’s glove,
Whock! of line drive into the gap,
Ball rolling free across the green
While the runner speeds for home.
Home.

Let’s keep going, friend.
There’s another bridge up ahead and
a ballpark’s lights shining somewhere in the dusk
of the upper Midwest and the open road
unrolls toward the setting sun.

1.  Lying in the Dark

I stare toward empty heaven
which darkness fills
and I lie down,
become the horizon,
axis for the night to spin.  
The past was worse than you thought,
voices say, and poetry won’t keep us quiet.
I float toward sleep
on a tide of loss,
drifting toward morning,
beached by sunrise,
stranded in the empty skin of another day.

2. The Reappearing World

New light assembles the same objects
and forgives mere longing
in ordinary darkness.
Gloom is porous.
Dawn seeps in.
Things of the world resist
but return to radiance.
There are voices, laughter, faint at first.
Love like laughter comes when it will.
Warm flecks of morning dance in a square of sunlight.

In this place
The air is so dry that water sulks.
The sky is a viscous brown mosaic.
The sulfurous fumes of old suffering linger.

A woman stares as if trying to unsee creation.
Words on a man’s tongue sound
like rhythmic coughing.
At the only stoplight
the crosswalk sign flashes “Don’t waltz.”

Strangers recoil from me
as if from an embarrassing stain.

People stream to the town square
for some indecipherable ritual.
Probably a funeral for the sun
or a snake oil sale.

Welcome to humankind’s true garden.
Not paradise but a place of desolation,
and what comes after is not exile but striving
and getting the hell out.

So long, mom and dad.