Night after night, what she saw in her sleep:
an upside down Havdalah candle like the one she lit
to usher in a new week at the end of every Sabbath,

praying, “Blessed God, who separates light from dark…” 

The candle in her dreams, like her real candle,
had four wicks and four braided strands of wax,
but produced no flames, only entrails of light.

And she dreamt God unhinged the constellations
and whisked away the stars. Uncreating. Uncreating.
The pitch darkness: a grave she couldn’t find a way out of.

And she dreamt she was a stone a crow lifted
and tucked into the wind:
a girl born to memory that hushes the sun
and takes the place of trees’ shadows.

When she woke, the war still raged
and the sky hardened into rock.

She wondered: why is God doing this?
And the thunder thundered: why are people doing this?  

Despair swooping over her, her grief a kind of wingspan.

Delirious as the rain the river guzzled,
she became a stranger to herself,
circling her own shadow, searching for her beliefs,
her mind like shattered glass,

and the world stuck in her throat like a bone—

^{to Mary Rose}

Here is our little yard  

too small            for a pool  
or chickens   let alone 

a game of tag or touch 
football       Then 

again   this stub-  
born patch  

of crabgrass  is just 
big enough      to get down  

flat on our backs 
with eyes wide open    and face 

the whole gray sky  just 
as a good drizzle 

begins                   I know  
we’ve had a monsoon  

of grieving to do  
which is why  

I promise    to lie 
beside you  

for as long as you like  
or need  

We’ll let our elbows 
kiss     under the downpour  

until we’re soaked  
like two huge nets  
                    left  

beside the sea  
whose heavy old

ropes strain  
stout with fish 

If we had to     we could  
feed a multitude  

with our sorrows  
If we had to  

we could name   a loss  
for every other  

drop of rain   All these  
foreign flowers 

you plant from pot  
to plot  

with muddy fingers  
—passion, jasmine, tuberose—  

we’ll sip 
the dew from them  

My darling                here
is the door I promised  

Here
is our broken bowl Here  

                        my hands  
In the home of our dreams  

the windows open  
in every  

weather—doused  
or dry—May we never  

be so parched 

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Once, you had gills 
and lived in the water 

of my body. While I 
planned for you, put 

sugar in a dish to attract 
all that’s sweet, sang 

along with Billie Holiday 
so you’d know sway. 

But you were already 
poetry, the meter  

of my heart in harmony 
with yours, their iambic 

fits and the pentameter  
of my gait, my sleeping 

breath. Oh, to keep  
you there, steady 

beat of life and coming 
to know the power 

of opening your eyes. 
Each day now I soothe 

your skin with peony 
cream where it grows 

coarser by the day,  
I shield the summer  

sun from your eyes 
and blow your tender 

head where it’s become 
wet from the heat, I teach 

you to keep yourself 
buoyant on the waves 

so one day you can find  
and thrive in the sea again. 

To live without the one you love
an empty dream never known
true happiness except as such youth

watching snow at window
listening to old music through morning.
Riding down that deserted street

by evening in a lonely cab
     past a blighted theatre
oh god yes, I missed the chance of my life

     when I gasped, when I got up and
        rushed out the room
          away from you.

is like being burned up
in a twelfth-floor elevator.
Or drowned in a flipped SUV.

It’s like waking with scalpels 
arrayed on my chest.
Like being banished to 1983.

Having a fight with you 
is never, ever less horrid: that whisper 
that says you never loved me—

my heart a stalled engine
out the little square window.
Your eyes a white-capped black sea.

Sometimes when you start to ramble
or rather when you feel you are starting to ramble
you will say Well, now I’m rambling
though I don’t think you ever are.
And if you ever are I don’t really care.
And not just because I and everyone really 
at times falls into our own unspooling
—which really I think is a beautiful softness
of being human, trying to show someone else
the color of all our threads, wanting another to know 
everything in us we are trying to show them—
but in the specific, 
in the specific of you
here in this car that you are driving
and in which I am sitting beside you
with regards to you 
and your specific mouth
parting to give way
to the specific sweetness that is
the water of your voice 
tumbling forth—like I said 
I don’t ever really mind
how much more 
you might keep speaking
as it simply means 
I get to hear you 
speak for longer. 
What was a stream 
now a river.