Emptying Town (audio only)
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A black river flows down the center of each page & on either side the banks are wrapped in snow. My father is ink falling in tiny blossoms, a bottle wrapped in a paperbag. I want to believe that if I get the story right we will rise, newly formed, that I will stand over him again as he sleeps outside under the church halogen only this time I will know what to say. It is night & it's snowing & starlings fill the trees above us, so many it seems the leaves sing.
2004
The newly dead hung on to the ceiling last night
like moths, wanting to tell us what they hadn’t
found words for yet, their bodies still
warm on their mattresses below—they did not look
comfortable, passing themselves on the way
Isn’t there a bird (what’s its name?)
that collects blue
things—bottle cap, rubber band,
bits of broken
cups—to make an elaborate, sparkling
blue nest on the ground. At
a meeting, a woman spoke of
her brother, who’d just
OD’d—teary,
she said she knew it was God’s
will. We all want to be held
a little higher. Bower
bird, that’s the name, it gathers
all that blue
2019