“Grave Dressing” and other poems
There’s a phrase for it, the way
I’m lately loving like a river
is pressed to my doorWith frightening
ease I’ve shot sparrows for food
I did not needI dreamed you
into a stormfield of lavender
bluegrass to sayRemember the old
man who put his soup down
on the sidewalk and eased his wife
into the rain?They trembled
in their minivan like bees caught
on opposing wavelengths
Most people when given
any foreign object will begin
to chew itThe picture
of the newest boy who died
in the school shooting transposed
across the picture of the newest
boy to die in the border camps
Their fathers teared up like grapefruits
in the heatAll the capybaras sighing
into extinction so wordlessly
it’s now clichéI know a disturbing lack
of fire alarms is standardHow lately
I’ve been loving like a tornado
shelter enkindled in votive
candlesWe are not obliged to fear
everything that makes us ache
with craving for this world
There are flowers and time
for them to look upon us
painedBut I dread caterpillars
munching holes in your tender summer
cherry tomato heartSometimes I think I know
how to do nothing well except grieve
menI’m aware it’s a problem, how lately
I’m loving from within this ditch
peppered with turkey buzzardsI talk
about the fires because language
was invented as warfare technology
and my unruly mouth doesn’t know
any other way to beBut I have
no authorityI eat the cloven
creaturesI recycle
secularlyThe oceans still will spill
into cities like screaming doorbells
while we’re busy dousing
ourselves in gasoline and calling
it needI’m tumbling
towards adoration for the cosmos
lifting its seafoam veilThe sun
snuffing its eye out with its magenta
palm and new awareness of your
approximately six frecklesWhen
you tell me we will see every place
you set foot as a child slip
irrevocably underwaterOh ambition
is like trying to catch a moth
in your bare hand and then
catching it
to be human is to be peopled by loneliness / to carry loneliness
like a stillborn city inside you / which is to say I lost my father
young / & flung my mother’s name into a nest of sleeping vermin
tossed the concept of my child’s body to a pit of snakes / rather than rely
on breath to strangle it / which is to say I keep a copy of the book of the dead
between my arm & my pillow / sleep gutted ink-blacken each name
stare in the craven dark so long / they all begin to look like mine
to stumble hateful & blind / to share my shadow like a pool float in the restless
waves of night’s crazed anchor / a bruise is the blood howling
like a kennel of dogs behind a closed door / & each day is a page in a long
book of endings that never come true / every brazen touch a book of leavings
there must be a way to know a heart from the inside / & forgive its unruly tunnels
its failings to teeter the edge / between sheltered & swallowed / which is to say
that to live without context is to live like granite shifting / oblivious as wood
before the saw’s teeth / every stranger is a collection of cartilage
& marrow with undefined intention / every place you have felt loved in
is another person’s grave / which is to say love is a boneless room
full of moons / where the hands stutter & are reborn finally
as lanterns / where we come together / where we sink in
innocent as breadknives
I dated a beekeeper that winter out of longing
for spring. Because the days were rough opals
circling a wound & I didn’t care
what happened to me. Because his mutters
of honey — & thought yes perhaps to name
the breathing objects of this life in sweetness
would make a mouth taste sweet. I watched
him pour buckets of thick amber in a house
that smelled like someone’s grandparents
left them too young, & this was the year
the last five men I’d fucked or loved were blue-
eyed, one long nightmare of wish-fulfillment & I stopped
calling myself vegetarian, though still told most people
I met that pigs have the consciousness
of a human toddler. New Years I’d resolved to eat
fewer animal bodies & consumed three bags
of pork rinds the following day. So I bite down
on the absolute freedom of failure, so a beekeeper
works his way inside me like a gardener tilling air into bloom
& my body opens without my permission. In his kitchen
was a black liquor bottle with another man’s name
& I turned the label away while he kissed me.
The mattress on the floor collecting
frantic capillaries, frictionless sparks
of want hiving in my cricket legs
until the room began to smell of souring bodies.
His human name was Adam & he was the first man
I let come inside of me. Buzz of energy pulsing
under my hips, the muffled thud of dead antelopes.
Frivolous loss of judgement, I am able to admit
I am the embarrassing scriptwriter & costumer
of my own life, that in fearful delight I fantasized
a storybook grief that could become, at least,
this title, that it might take scalpel & suction to hollow
myself of him & remembering
he had only daughters, their small hands
stained in ink, captives in a photo hidden
hastily in the crease of his bookshelf.
Remembering the first cold night I stopped
at the gas station & drove home with a bag
of beef jerky in hand, triumphant,
the not-quite promise of intimacy
dripping down my thigh.
