Away, staying in hotels, is living in an extreme state.
Things don't always make sense.
Everything needs a key. You can't find what you need.
And the coffee is weak. The news is dull.
They leave you a wrench in case you want to adjust the AC.
You call down to the front desk.
Here for a wedding. Weddings, weddings;
you can't live every day like a wedding.
Like living in a storm.

(after Leonid Andreyev)

I know it's impossible to believe,
but I have returned to life.

I ceased to exist for three days.
I was nothing for three days.

But today, I am something.
At first, I was so weak, after being on my back for three days.

But now that I am standing – now that I am able to stand –
I can throw off this dark cloak

of the flesh, which has always followed the narrative:
Life, then Death, then Infinite Nothingness, ...

Look at me.  Have I changed?
Look at me. Do I look differently?

And so, what do you want to ask me? Is it:
What was it like? What was it like to be nothing?

No one can know such profound nothingness;
I wasn't there, after all: I was dead.

And now, I want to be recognized again,
as I was, before my death.

I want to live, go on, continue,
not scarred, not horribly transformed,

but whole.  Here is a second birth,
a second life, a second chance,

until my next death.

Under the knife for a tumour
a globe under his skull
in surgery's blood

eventually awake from gray anaesthetic
entering the floors of healing
in the anonymity of white hospital sheets

among heart attacks and appendicitis
bone marrows, tubes tied,
eyes straightened and bones set

"several years of reading got rubbed out"
the messenger with his hands to his head
without a point of reference.

reviewing his brain for messages to return
then reading and rereading what he has already read
trying to make up for lost messages  

connecting the dots of the electrons of his brain
so that he may return to the village
and tell us where he has been.

Angular sparrow, luxurious, towering swan,
beautiful sidekick. This might be
a Forget-About-Him Poem.
I want to take You into my arms.

Come to where we and the others live:
You and I and everyone else I know, we can live
in the familiar world of half-having,
dreaming of more, but never truly wanting it.

Come back to the Apartment Life You led
as a girl. We would do things like
let You Make Meals for us.
We would let You do Normal Things,

like Take out the Trash and Watch the Kids
and Wipe the Table  and Do the Dishes.
We wouldn't make You wear Makeup.
We wouldn't make You wear Heels.

You could be one of us.
We would never ask You to try to seem
or look other than what You are.
I'll tell You, it will be like a dream:

and the Rich will be envious of the Poor;
we don't have; we are.
It is a simple paradise,
and no one gets *******.

Something new
moves within me.

I am leased
to a small, nameless tenant,
who rummages
in the rooms of my body,
rearranging the furniture
in the middle of the night.

Until now,
I had always been sure
of the soft,
but established boundary
of where I
ended
and the neighbours
began.

My body has become serious.
I sit by the front window.

Ready for anything.
My head cocked like a gun.

I pass by the spa each morning
when it is empty and I can see her
placing fresh fruit at the feet of the Buddha
in the little red shrine she keeps by the door.
She lights the candles that surround him.
This is part of starting the business day,
alongside counting the money in the till
and turning on the OPEN sign.

When I come in for a pedicure,
she doesn’t look into my face.
She bows her head and bends
her body toward my feet.
This is a strange posture of power
that she and I do not like, and we both spend
the next hour pretending it is not happening.

But she is tiny and powerful.
She is very good at what she does.
She barely has to think. I trust her.

She is sweet and rude.  To the other pedicurists,
she speaks suddenly, and seemingly angrily
in their language, though she does not turn
her body to them, and her body expresses no anger.

One time, she tried to speak in English with me.
“How many kids you have?” she asks me.
“None,” I say. “How many do you have?”
“Three,” she says. “All boys.”
“All boys?” I ask.” Yes,” she says.
She shakes her head.
I shake my head, too, in support of her.
She bows her head and bends her body
toward my feet because of – and for – these boys.

She rolls up her sleeves,
and I see for the first time that there is
a long white scar along her left arm.
I wonder what could have happened ...
I can see where someone has folded
together the two banks of skin and,
in and out, sewn them tight to dam the blood,
leaving a deep dry river bed,
footprints of holes along the banks
where perhaps her boys played childish games,
digging for treasure, without knowing
how much they were hurting her.

Then his wife said to him, “Do you still persist in your integrity?
Curse God, and die.”
— Job 2:9

Job was a rich man
who, in a trial of divine justice,
was dismantled of all he owned
by a fire that fell from heaven.
Sick and God-blinded, he repented.

But who speaks of his wife’s suffering?
Perhaps she was a woman who took great joy
in things and possessions and luxuries.
Perhaps she sat on heaps of soot,
itemizing the absolute sum of her loss,
calling out to God in argument, crying:

“In whom can I have faith
when the Giver takes that which is given?
And when the love of that
which is loved, and given, and taken,
is instilled in me by the Lover,
the Giver, the Taker?

“Now, I live for nothing.
I long for death, but it does not come.
And yet You have ensured
I survived to tell You this.”