I.
I wonder if you remember me.
You said, “Go out. Find me
that universe, and take these
with you.” Talismans.
Good luck charms like Mozart
and fifty-five ways to say hello.
Navajo night chant,
Peruvian wedding song,
diagrams of ribcages, gender,
bushmen and bones.
Gifts for a people you said
I may never meet.

It has been thirty-four years
and I wonder if you remember me.

II.
Less and less,
we call across the distance:
sixteen-point-twelve hours
between transmissions
and I wonder if you remember me.
I nearly kissed Jupiter for you,
nearly skimmed Saturn’s bright rings,
but you said, “Go out.
Find me that universe,”
so I sail out into the dark for you.

I keep a photo of you,
twenty years ancient,
to keep away the quiet
between your calls:
pale pixel, distant dot,
my origin receding,
I wonder if you remember me.

III.
I know now,
you never meant
to call me home.
Dutifully, I will go out,
but I wonder if you forget me.
I am still here, sailing.

Press your ear close.

Sometimes you can hear the breath
rattling in my chest like a bone shrugged
its moorings and ought to be tied back down.

It’s the sound of a canyon
trying to expel a marsh:
hear the stones tumble down,
clatter and splash,
the stiff reeds scouring the walls.
Stuck bristles. Sticks.
The marsh is dauntless.
It can’t be pushed out through
the canyon’s narrow mouth.

It’s the sound of a cave-in.
Press your ear close and
listen to picks and shovels
plinking on the rock.
Soon the oxygen gives out
and all the miners go to sleep,
or they punch a hole through
to the sky and breathe,
mouths pressed to the breach,
gasping a little at a time.

It’s the sound of a brier patch
growing in your lungs.
It’s the sound of a brier patch
set on fire.

The parents are sitting
behind a glass wall
on a brown leather couch.
Not black.
Not a black couch.
There is nothing black
in the room at all.

There is a glass coffee table
with shiny chrome legs.
There is a ceramic vase
holding red flowers.
There is a window
overlooking the hospital yard,
green grass, oak trees.

There is a mother, wringing her hands,
there is a father, grinding his teeth,
and there is silence.

There is so much
ready to break
in this trembling room.

I broke your grandmother’s vase.
The blue one, patterned with lilacs,
liberated from a secondhand store
in Czechoslovakia in 1939.

Like your grandmother,
it came with stories:
she talked a German officer
into buying it for her
in exchange for a date
she never showed up for,
the year her brother
put her on a train with a trunk
full of dresses and a little sister,
a hundred korunas sewn
into her underwear, where she knew
no one would find them.

I broke your grandmother’s vase.
I knocked it off the shelf,
dove to catch it, missed,
and watched it shatter into
thirty-nine pieces, patterned with lilacs.
Thirty-nine, because I counted
every piece as I hid them
in a drawer in the shed behind
the house, beside the hammer
and wrench, where I knew
you would not find them.

The bane of my existence
As a HePo writer
Every time I go to read
I get this stupid blighter!

Don't know what is up
What is going wrong
I have a reading backlog
10,000 miles long!

I'm really beside myself!
This is the last straw!
I want to read your poetry
Not test Murphy's Law!

Just be patient please
I'm under the gun
A LOT of folks
are out there

*And I will read everyone!

i’ve decided that i will write
about you the way frida
wrote about diego
i love you and i wish
you never existed

I can see connections
But I often can't explain
It's not only in my mind
But it is bipolar brain

St. Bruno the Carthusian
Stephen King in Maine
Silent Daoist hermits
The Man of La Mancha, Spain

Wendy in the silence
Mad but not insane
My postcards to Alex
Ride the Tucson Train

Soren Kierkegaard
Melancholy Dane
Help me reach the single one
Miles Morales y Lois Lane

           I am a window pane.

I slacked off all day
so tomorrow I’ll work my
fingers to the bone.