I have lived in your face
I have lived in your face. Have I been you? Your mother? giving you birth —this pain whenever I say goodbye to thee —up to now I always wanted it but not this
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For love,
you leapt sometimes
you walked away sometimes
that time on the phone you
couldn’t get your breath
I leapt but couldn’t get to you
I caught the brow that bid the dead
I caught the bough that hid
I’m, you know, still here,
tulip, resin, temporary—
2016
Friend,
You came in a dream, yesterday
—The first day we met
you showed me your dark workroom
off the kitchen, your books, your notebooks.
Reading our last, knowing-last letters
—the years of our friendship
reading our poems to each other,
I would start breathing again.
Yesterday, in the afternoon,
more than a year since you died,
some words came into the air.
I looked away a second,
and they were gone,
six lines, just passing through.
for Adrienne Rich
2013
The Branches
The branches looked first like tepees, but there was no emptiness. Like piles of leaves waiting for fire: at the foot of the wisewoman trees, at the foot of the broken General, next to the tree of the veteran girl who died this summer slow red cloth
2009