^{If death is the absence of life, / then death’s death is life.
—Sun Ra}

      Gather your losses, oblong
& indiscriminate: avocado rot,
      football, cracked soap dish;
dropped eggshells, embryo
      gone. Gather mutilated joy.
Smelted promises. Aloft,
      here & now. In open air.
Gather your heartbreak, wind-
      ing & windowless. Animal
the shadow, lurking
      at the edges
of your mouth.
      Needle into a nest
your intricate sorrows.
      Roost there. Gather
yourself. In a clearing—
      Or gather your losses
like twin sheets, stripped
      from a sick child’s bed.
I know I know it’s difficult
      to face it alone.
To know you must
      gather your darkness
or lose yourself to the animal
      that thrives therein. To vanquish
your losses in daylight,
      gather your life
by the scruff. Hold on
      to what you can.

i’m confident that the absolute dregs of possibility for this society,
the sugary coffee mound at the bottom of this cup,
our last best hope that when our little bit of assigned plasma implodes 
it won’t go down as a green mark in the cosmic ledger,
lies in the moment when you say hello to a bus driver 
and they say it back—

when someone holds the door open for you 
and you do a little jog to meet them where they are—

walking my dog, i used to see this older man 
and whenever I said good morning, 
he replied ‘GREAT morning’—

in fact, all the creative ways our people greet each other
may be the icing on this flaming trash cake hurtling through the ether. 

when the clerk says how are you 
and i say ‘i’m blessed and highly favored’ 

i mean my toes have met sand, and wiggled in it, a lot. 
i mean i have laughed until i choked and a friend slapped my back.
i mean my niece wrote me a note: ‘you are so smart + intellajet’

i mean when we do go careening into the sun, 

i’ll miss crossing guards ushering the grown folks too, like ducklings 
and the lifeguards at the community pool and
men who yelled out the window that they’d fix the dent in my car, 
right now! it’d just take a second—

and actually everyone who tried to keep me alive, keep me afloat, 
and if not unblemished, suitably repaired.

but I won’t feel too sad about it,
becoming a star 

There are dogs who will follow you 
perpetually and as gladly 
as if it were their purpose in life, 
at least while in the act of following you. 

Other dogs enjoy being followed. 
They sniff around, look back, then run ahead. 

W. B. Yeats, so monumentally heartsick, 
spent his boyhood summers 
following a black dog and a white dog 
around the hilly Irish countryside, 
as if that were the purpose of his life, 
which it might have been at the time. 

Clearly, there are worse practices 
than spending your time following a dog 
whichever way she may roam 
into the woods or across a stream. 

How would it be possible 
to slap a child or smuggle arms 
to a band of wrathful guerrillas 
if you’re busy keeping up with a dog? 

So, instead of following your bliss, 
follow around some lighthearted dog. 

Surely, it’s better than doing nothing, 
if anything were better than doing nothing, 

which, setting dogs aside for now, 
is said to be the best thing one can do 
or not do, but in a positive way, forever, amen.

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.

^{—for Melissa} 

What sadness anywhere is sadness where
I could just stand and walk to you      from sadness 
Go      home to you though I bring home my sadness 
What sadness there though I have felt sad there

Before      when I come home from far away
What sadness then      or from three blocks uptown 
My office      where I write this poem down
In a room full of the dimness that fills spac-

es anywhere where you are not      a film 
Obscuring every surface but it is a light 
Not shining      ever from surfaces

You are not near what sadness      where you might 
By being near reveal each thing for what it is
What sadness where each thing is whole

A friend called up saying he was in a pre-suicidal mood.
I told him to come over.
I’d pay for the taxi.
“Will you go back with me to my apartment if I start to panic?”
I told him I would.
He arrived feeling chipper.
He wanted some wine.
I gave him a little cold sauterne that had been sitting
around in the icebox three weeks.
He said it tasted sour.

He looked at all my photographs.
He said he was feeling better.
We went out to dinner,
But it had to be on Madison Avenue.
For some reason he trusted Madison Avenue whereas Lexington, Third, Second and
     York were out to get him.
We sat in the last table far away from any draught.
I had my eyes on the delicatessen floor.
The radio was full of George Wallace being shot.
“Just like Huey Long,” said my friend.
“Nixon did it
Now the gangsters are in the White House!”
I didn’t argue.
My eyes were on my plate, Stuffed Derma and french fries.
Indigestible.
Suddenly he asked: “Are you feeling closer to me...?”

Of course I was,
I loved him.
But I used different words so as not to frighten him.
His head vibrated like a top whirling so fast you can't see it spin.

We paid the check and I told him as we were walking along Fifth Avenue, to catch the
     park and its rusty sunset, that I was also going through a bad time.
I had pinned my hopes on a shallow woman.
Though I no longer wanted her I felt curiously enervated.
Why this pain in my abdomen.
“Very simple,” explained my friend.
“You experience an expansion, joy, the energy flows into all parts of the body.
Then a contraction, blocked, everything goes to the stomach.
You’re still in high energy.
But there’s no release.
The result is despair.”
“That’s it exactly!” I said to him.
It was getting darker and the first fat raindrops spattered onto the canopies.
The doormen were slipping inside, I was too excited to care.
“Answer me one more thing: expansion, contraction, physiology, I understand
     perfectly.
But what is it that stops us, when we're so near to joy?”

Only now did I notice my friend had his mad look.
His eyes, always beautiful, slid into passing cars.
He begged me to stop talking but I wouldn’t.
I challenged him to explain the connections.
This nightfall, the orange chocolate smell, the dumpy couple walking by.
“Look at them,” he said. “They’re not going crazy.
Because they’re healthy?
Or because they can’t feel enough, because they don’t know how to feel it.”

Just then I felt it! Right through my body. “I feel it! I know what you mean! I feel it too!” I wanted him to know... “I don’t think I’ll wait for a bus,” he said and jumped into a cab. His face wobbled against the wet glass.

The next day he was still alive. Still alive.

everyone knows about the woman who fell in love with the bridge
but no one cares how the bridge felt after.

everyone knows about the poet who leapt from the deck of a ship
but not how the boat lifted & bloated in his wake like a white infant
spread over the bed of a lake.

we leave our objects behind us. we collect our dead’s leavings & listen
for their breathing in the soft mouths of gloves. we believe them.

i care too much & still have the dead boy’s red sweater. i tongue
the wound. i tender this mule. i unravel quick my flesh debt.

every word an object in my dark wet house. everyone asks after
the living but no one cares how the cotton sobs in my mouth.

i am become warehouse               :             i am destroy speech.

everyone knows the poet fell from the bridge because he jumped.
no one cares there’s nothing left for us but his poems

not even a simple plaque drilled into the bridge’s throat reads :

     this is where the man lived
     this is where the man broke
     this is the man
     this is the man stretched
     between two cold cities
     you are standing
     on his back.

Niece,
I remember when they cut your mother 
and pulled your sister out, then you, 
and how you cried and cried.
You never wanted to be here. 
Right from the start.

I open Mama’s old prayer book 
but the words billow like rain.
I wish you had loved
one thing enough to make you 
want to stay; the orange sunsets, 
your drooling dog, the fig tree
in the backyard, your twin sister’s mole, 
Cheerios in cold milk.

Washing your body now,
twenty-four years of bones and flesh 
laid out tall and stiff on this hard table, 
is the cruelest task.

I stand here full of heartbeat.
Touching you is like dipping hands in a cold sea.

I soak a porous sponge in water scented 
with rose, brush it against your neck, 
along your arms, those long, thin legs. 
There is a tampon still inside, the string 
hanging out like the detonator of a bomb.

Darkness bends over itself to devour 
what it will not hold—
the boy you loved watched you cry, 
take a handful of pills,
                                    and said nothing.