Grief shall not be my friend!   She shall not be
Companion of my table, path or bed,
She shall not share my salt nor break my bread,
Nor walk nor weep nor dream nor wake with me:
I will not trust her mournful company,
Nor listen to her whisperings of the dead,
Why should I heed her somber eyelid’s red?
Tears are but chains and I, I would be free!

For grief would make a laggard of my will,
And me, a puny thing of anguished need,
A memory!   And I would die at length,
Close to the thought of you—and loving still:
So will I choose a friend of stouter creed,
The wingless, tearless thing the heart calls strength.

I repeat “dead” aloud enough times for its meaning to loosen 

from sense. Once the word I repeat is no longer comprehensible, 

it begins to attack everything else I know.

Giorgio Agamben says devastation is one face of a Genius 

that exists inside us. The other face is creation.

The two sounds that begin and end “dead” echo in my ears. 

Then a third appears between them. The middle sound, between 

the coronal plosives of the letter d, is the ghost.

Agamben tells us that the Genius is within us only as long if 

we realize it does not belong to us. Just as existence does not.

Now I begin to voice only the ghost, and watch it ‘not appear.’

Is the narrow space between my Genius’s two faces 

where that ghost lives? When I listen for what will not appear, 

I hear my own voicelessness amplify. 

My hearing is most acute when I’m naked 

in front of the bedroom mirror.

I want voicelessness to create an echoing hollow 

inside every word I type.

I feel how listening to find disappearances makes my nipples erect. 

Disappearance is my new self-seduction.

^{at the Sipsey River}

make small steps.
in this wild place
there are signs of life
everywhere.
sharp spaces, too:
the slip of a rain-glazed rock
against my searching feet.
small steps, like prayers—
each one a hope exhaled
into the trees. please,
let me enter. please, let me
leave whole.
there are, too, the tiny sounds
of faraway birds. the safety
in their promise of song.
the puddle forming, finally,
after summer rain.
the golden butterfly
against the cave-dark.
maybe there are angels here, too— 
what else can i call the crown of light 
atop the leaves?
what else can i call
my footsteps forward,
small, small, sure?

^{for Kelly Caldwell (1988–2020)}

Yet your voice was here—

                         just there-here in our house, shining eyes
who dazzled twice, already timed,

a pulsing wind below the glass in spring,
and coaxed, intelligent, stoic, touching everything, you stirred
me to life, in spite of illness and damage

to the country, field laid waste, election blaze, illness
wasting a brain, a mind. Mars, and ocean, canceled.
Cream and streamers, canceled, 

                                                  censored. 
“I am,” you said, 
                         though your skin flickered

to hackberry bark, or as bullet 
pierced pineal gland, blinking out
your day-night clock. Your syllables

endure frail days, which blow
through equinox, dissipate, time out—

            you imagined the planet
            with you already gone:

a sad expression, no real loss, the earth still a wild salon,

yet the name you chose
is etched into air, a violent wind
parts my chest, tenderviolet, electric

nights in our sheets, no longer 
countable, unrecounted. You, here, again,
my is-are-were, have-been-is, in my 

arms, bed is-was our house-eyes, in my 
only thought only root only gone,
my big only gone still here voice
blazing, I mourn you-her, 

her-you, who were born-dreamed into the world’s thicket
yet reinvented through an inner radiance, 
the radiance of a name, 
the name that is yours,
the radiance that is-was yours 
                                    that is-was you—