I suppose that's how they live,
like suicides. I dream often of them
without this body. I resent
this creaking, of course, but you
once looked at me in that way
I wanted. When I look long ago enough
sometimes you still speak. It's the heights
and the grey that gets to me. The stairs,
and the stares I give down to them
when climbing more floors. This cocooning,
I wonder it. Its ending.
To leap undiscovered for a few seconds
and flutter. Couldn't.
I'm living. The child's pretty silence
of match-playing, that light, that living, that
no-reason of everything looking
like this at all: this strange
clicking, the pulls of the iris,
the lens-widening, the swallowing
blackness the center of a looking that
I once thought was new. Like it,
the skyscraping growth of any tree
deciding against earth, I look pretty.
And short.

She's as spry as a slice of
young ginger.

My brain invents a new kind of sadness for me.
I wrap it up in newspaper and carry it
somewhere. Debone it, then grill. Wish
that it could swim, watch it swim
back in me. Certain kinds of meals you cannot share.

Weird, long, scary parts of you...
Those hours... Take notes
of them. Dream even
when passing by these old walls.
And paint them...

There's this bell that rings redbrick on days I stay in.
This bell that rings sings to me as a clubfooted horse.
Brassbeating hooves are as a chest at nightfall: Russian dolls are as real
as people: Everything is all alike as the "and"
and "and" that Bishop feared. There
is nothing in us from catching fishes then returning their swim. There
is nothing in us from drinking from seawater, from moth-tear, from
the moonlight that creepers in there when your mouth
     figures itself
as bell or foot: I should wake up. I should wake.  
I should, I should.

(after Sarah Manguso)

The darkness of your eyes is a curious darkness.
I mean when I close them. Old dances are equal
in distraction, like the shifts in subjects in a song.
That's just the different voice in a choir, I mean.
I mean, I mean to mean: Meaning from the random
statistical patterns of this... "world"? Is it right
to call everything "this"? "World" seems to mean "here" and yes,
with "us". Like the positivists told the scientists, "yes"
this thing with our eyes-- expansive eyes,
microscope eyes telescope eyes large hadron collider eyes mathy eyes
--these eyes are "I". Would I be comfort,
--and yes, the substance of that word and not the action
that entails the substance being a thing that can be
--would you be comforted by the thing that sees
being the thing that sees you as you? Imagine
some other singer singing that no other such thing
exists besides ourselves. Is that comfort? Is that
a person or a poem? Is everything in that the same? Wonder
with me back to empiricism. Knock on the table
and think of it not as Idea (that beneath our own
that we wished to wish). Wonder
with me on this song, back-of-the-envelope
calculated tipsily, alone, at the edge of a party
--okay, the party of (this) life. Wonder
with me, there, here,
always. And open
your throat.

Often as if a moth ran into the room like that--
wing-legged athlete-- defeated
by the lamp it saw bubbling though my window...
My mood swoops down as often as this,
totally normal but unexpected. The mind is a machine
(and you knew this too, Descartes,
given how you placed the souls of us
in some specific spot of our brains;
we know now that that gland has to do with our sleeping,
our souls have more to do with sleep).
When the gears of our minds turn they sometimes creak,
and you get words with such unfitting-- the moth
again, whose parents never said before they bashed
themselves clean into night-light, you don't
have to do this, you shouldn't do this, please
do not do this and so they did this. The moth
does this as stuck gears, beating and beating itself
against the light as my own mind fails to mind
itself, and the sudden grey of it, familiar as
the glittering powder of its wings, particles floating as
a possible music of the world.
Then I flicker my eyes back to my work as if to say
how boring, I've seen this episode before.