I
We are both silver sea-trout
And have risen to delicate flies on streams
And got away.
The young ferns balance on the wet earth
Like green smoke above a coal.
Let us watch the sun throw gold plates
Down to us through lake water
Where none fish.

             II
The Recreation Gardens are smothered over
With a bottle-coloured wood of wet trees
And the gates were shut at ten.
With your straight thin pipe and your face and arms
Stamped black as against mauve paper
You sit piping in our open window.
It may be only a very large daintily-moving dog
Shut in the Gardens, and that I did not hear 
The few notes like a sleepy quail.

             III
I have bought a pound of jade wool
Of the color of the round bases of toy trees
And a quarter of mole wool
Coloured like the smoke of a steamer.
In two or three weels
You, whose spirit is as quick as silver dust
Stirred into the sea,
Shall have the appearance of a tinted 
Jacinth laughing in the rain.

            IV
There is frost
As if a cutter of images of you
Had dropped powder of geranium marble
On the coarse dark grass.
I have left you asleep
And feel that if the candle
Set down inside the open door
To throw continuous William Allen Richardson roses
Into the cold lavender morning
Does not blow out before I get back
You will still be there.

             V
Because of the glass shade
Our marble table was ever the cross-bar
Of a white A
And the rest angles of broken lemon light
With a drowned sprig of mountain-ash berries,
A peat-coloured crystal carrying
Cherries and crushed mint against your lips.
Now the nights are a cool
Pattern of thin black wood bed-bars
With spread of orange and another orange,
Firm black letters lightly carrying eyes
Among white margins,
And brown tea.

             VI
The night is so full of movement
That the stars seem like corn being threshed
Against a blue barn.
The wind is a black river
And just for a moment
The moon a small green fish
Swimming in your hair.

He closed the door.
January bit through the walls.

The bed kept the warmth
seventeen minutes, then none.
No witness but the sheets.

I thought I stayed.

I inventoried the fridge.
The cream had turned.
I was late to the news of myself.

I didn’t starve.
I just never came back to the table.

Even hunger
has standards.

I left later,
quiet enough that air forgot me.
I went the way women go
who survive too long.

Afterward
I moved through rooms without arriving.
I lived like a light you forget to turn off.

The cream soured.
And I was elsewhere
long before I knew it

^{—after Edna St. Vincent Millay}

I.   
I forget there were good things, too— 
Revere Beach and feeding seagulls soggy french fries,  
watching them plunge into the sand, then emerge,  
the red spot of their beaks mistaken for ketchup. 

II. 
Beauty intercepts the drive home. The sky  
beckons with its clouds the shape of a ribcage  
opening upward. Another is a honeycomb.  
Imagine being brushed by the air enough times. 
Imagine you’re unrecognizable.

All our windows open, steady drizzle on the kudzu’s 
broad backs, birds making their music like this isn’t North 
Carolina, but a tropical rainforest, and we’re somewhere 
deep in the palms and vines. But it’s our own ferns and fiddleheads, 
evergreens and sugar maples, trillium blooming, or on the verge, 
for no one in particular, for everyone in particular, as if to say, 
Go on, enjoy it. Rain, flowers, time on earth. The apple I  
hand-picked at the market. Braiding my friend’s hair, silver  
in my fingers, how I tie a tiny bow gently at the end 
just as the sun comes out. I want to believe this is true power, that 
kindness is the only weapon worth wielding, and I wield it, 
land blow after blow to my enemies, without mercy. 
Mercy. Bring the wine. Set the table for surprise guests.  
No matter the plates don’t match and we’ve run out of chairs, 
only that there is bread and laughter, enough to go around. 
Parades, in spite of—Pride, in spite of—Please, someone answer all my 
questions about hummingbirds and the little futures we are 
reaching for, the ones rising above the horizon right before our eyes,  
such intoxicating visions, our truest selves, with nothing to hide. Go on. 
Trust the child standing barefoot in the rain, her face turned 
up to the sky. Trust that crescendo building in your chest is your 
voice, singing what you need to hear, the stone-heavy echo 
welled from darkest springs. Go ahead. Open the door. No one can 
explain how to love the world. It doesn’t happen all at once. But 
you can start here. Tonight, with yourself. Someone near you. Let it go 
zigzagging town to town. Look, there. It’s already coming back around.

What are these strangers 
sitting on the table in their ruffled
collars. They open, close, open,
emit the scent of cracked pepper 
and honey. Magenta punctuation marks 
at which to pause. Pink commas 
against the green scrub. 
I would trade ten goats for one whiff 
of peonies opening in a vase. 
An ancient proverb says 
you should not let a woodpecker 
see you plucking a peony 
lest it peck out your eyes. 
We are afraid of happiness. 
Peonies are to loneliness 
what wind is to the trees. 
Are they animal? Mineral? 
Vegetable? They move 
as the sun moves. When I 
brought them home 
they were dark. Now, 
a whisper, balletic tulle. 
They are not diminished 
even as they turn to smoke. 

You saved me, you should remember me.

The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats.
Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.

When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling.

I remember sounds like that from my childhood,   
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,
something like that.

Lugano. Tables under the apple trees.
Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags.
And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water;
perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him.

Crucial
sounds or gestures like
a track laid down before the larger themes

and then unused, buried.

Islands in the distance. My mother   
holding out a plate of little cakes—

as far as I remember, changed
in no detail, the moment
vivid, intact, having never been
exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age   
hungry for life, utterly confident—

By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green   
pieced into the dark existing ground.

Surely spring has been returned to me, this time   
not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet   
it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.

Count me among the noon risers who stumble,
dazed and bad-haired, from the nest midday,
pecking the crazed dirt for half-torn moth, 
pear’s white core, severed worm. I’ve never 
been one to trill at chink of dawn, to hop, 
skip, chirrup before full sun. I’m better 
at picking over crumbs, stitching a quilt
from what’s left, remaindered, given up
for gone. Better at betting the careless 
will miss the best. Count me among
the nightbirds who sip starlight, a guitar’s
fading strains. Find me where moondust 
swirls in streetlamp glow and stray dogs sleep.
What clings to the bone is most sweet.

must look so small, undetectable even,
from the vantage point where I imagine 

a god could see me, and I do sometimes  
imagine a god like a sentient star

out beyond where our instruments 
could find it, then I talk myself 

out of the image. Out of the concept
entirely. From a distance, I know 

I’m an ant tunneling my way 
through sand between plastic panels, 

watched—or not—from outside. 
My puny movements on this planet, 

all the things I’ve done or built 
with my own body or mind, seem 

like nothing at all. But from the inside 
this life feels enormous, unlimited 

by the self—by selfness—
vaster even than the sparkling 

dark it can’t be seen from.