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 *******.

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.”

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.

She hates the children because they are not her own.
Her smile forced, her hands crooked with some secret defeat,
and the children pay for it.
From the back of the classroom, she looks beautiful,
but it is an illusion.
She has a mane of red hair framing her face like a lion’s mane.
But that is the most remarkable thing about her.
She is gaunt. She is very tall. She is unmistakable.

She is awkward when she relaxes. She fidgets and trembles.

In the playground, she has Yard Duty.
She resents the students in grades 2, 3, 4, …
because they have outgrown her, they no longer need her.
She must be in her thirties, you can tell by her hands.
And there is no ring there.
That might be the thing. There is no ring.

Her bed sheets are white.
She curls her long body up into a ball at night.
She works hard. She can’t help herself.
Yet she knows there is no reason to admire people
for working hard if they can’t do otherwise.

She’s absent from school today.
She is never absent.
The words that blow through the air in the playground
and hallways are: She is getting married today.
She decided to get married today.

She already hates her husband, though she hardly knows him.
She hates him because a person, a man,
needs to be attached to the ring that she wears
and the baby she will have. And why should there be?

He calls her name from the other side of the bed.
She curls herself up into a ball.
Perhaps she will hate her baby, too.
She might not be able to help it.
But can you blame someone for feeling
something she can’t help but feel?

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.

(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.

after Ohran Pamuk

Everything just rushes by  me now.
There are no longer the ritual pauses:
when I held a cigarette between *******,
I could hold Time itself.

I could pluck two stills
from the hurried film of my day –
one of what had just happened,
and the other of what might come next –

and I could stand, quietly alone
between those two frames,
holding time still in my hand,
and just look, and think, and smoke.

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.

My left eye is lazy, meanders the landscape.
my gaze crooked, my vision weak,
I cannot appreciate delicate objects;
I wait to hear about finer edges of what exists.

I try to speak and look into people's eyes;
they look through me, then over their shoulders
to see if someone else is behind them;
there is never anyone there.

There is a gulf between me
and the further side of what there is.

I hear whispers:
She sees the world with one eye,
and eternity with the other.

I think I might not know my son.
I'm not sure who he is, though I live with him –
a little eight-year old boy – just the two of us, living together
in a little apartment downtown.
I think we are lonely with each other there.

We are both tired and fed-up at the end of the day.
I say, Take off your shoes. Help me with this.
Wash your hands. Set the table. Sit down.
Then I have to repeat myself.
He tells me he loves me when he knows he's in trouble.

He can't wait not to have to look at me or listen to me,
so he shuts his bedroom door
and leaves me standing in the hall.

We spend the day apart, but it is not enough time.
It must be very unpleasant, living with someone like me.

I don't know which books to buy him,
or how to make him read one book over another.              
I look at children's books in stores,
but the books make me sad.
The comics are angry and ugly,
the other children's books are simple and foolish;
those ones must be below him, but then
I might not even know how old he is.

The summer comes and he is relieved school is over.
He begins to eat more and sleep better.
He begins to relax and thrive.
He is confident and contented.
He goes to day camp, and it is satisfying for him:
they swim and play games all day and the kids get tired out.

But the good changes the summer brings
aren't enough for the two of us; we need something more.
His father takes him on the train to see his grandparents,
and I spend the whole week trying to calm down.

I leave him alone for a few days, then finally I call.
He is reluctant to take the phone.
When he does, I think it's a joke:
someone is pretending to be my son, but it is he;
there's a little man on the other end, his voice deeper,
his words bigger than I remember.
It's the voice of someone I've never met.

Then he becomes impatient, and wants to get off the phone
so he can return to playing with his cousins.
He can't wait to get rid of me,
so that by the time I hang up,
I think I might know who that was.

When she steps onto the streetcar,
the passengers feel judged.
In this, for an instant all strangers are related.
A woman may offer her seat as if the pregnant woman were ill.
A man may sigh a nervous laugh to himself.
Standing near her, he can hear the other music of her body,
and it startles and embarrasses him:
his animal-self is waiting for signals from her
that his cocksure instincts can ordinarily understand.

Because few men celebrate the blood of another man’s child,
or cherish another man’s seed.
The root of his brain tells him: There must have been a chance:
There is always the chance it could have been me.
The loathing defeat of it that it wasn’t …

He turns away and looks out the window,
his hand a quivering fist at his mouth
as he chokes on his lust.