I’m Not Faking My Astonishment, Honest

Looking out over the cliff, we’re overwhelmed
by a sky that seems to heap danger upon us. We
end up staring at a single white fluff in the air—
feather, fur, dandelion puff—we don’t care
to define it. The relief of having something
to focus our attention. At home, our patio furniture
unscrews itself under the usual sun. On this trip—
well, I’m not any sadder, I just have more space
for my sadness to fill. I don’t want to give
particulars. A woman huffing up the trail behind
us says to her hiking partner, It wasn’t my size,
but it was only 9 dollars. And now all I want
is to see what it is. The future refuses
to happen, so where else should I turn?

When I Tell My Husband I Miss the Sun, He Knows

what I really mean. He paints my name
 
across the floral bed sheet and ties the bottom corners
to my ankles. Then he paints another
 
for himself. We walk into town and play the shadow game,
saying Oh! I'm sorry for stepping on your
 
shadow! and Please be careful! My shadow is caught in the wheels
of your shopping cart. It's all very polite.
 
Our shadows get dirty just like anyone's, so we take
them to the Laundromat—the one with
 
the 1996 Olympics themed pinball machine—
and watch our shadows warm
 
against each other. We bring the shadow game home
and (this is my favorite part) when we
 
stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so tangled
my husband grips his own wrist,
 
certain it's my wrist, and kisses it.

Logically, I Know the Circus

exists to keep audiences
unsatisfied with
their mundane homelives, yet here
I am pacing my bedroom
and having serious
thoughts about trapeze
artistry—greasy
eyeliner, powdered
hands—and can you even
apply to be in a traveling act,
or do you need to be
discovered? I don’t want to be
famous, just remembered.
In high school I was
voted most likely to
ignore the demands
of men and gravity,
but it’s a difficult feat
when the two work together.
Like here, or
like in the flying trapeze:
man secures his hold,
gravity improves the swing.

Related Poems

A blurry photograph

The tree azalea overwhelms the evening with its scent,
defining everything and the endless fields.

Walking away, suddenly, it slices off and is gone.

The visible object blurs open in front of you,
the outline of a branch folds back into itself, then clarifies—just as you turn away—

and the glass hardens into glass

as you go about taking care of things abstractedly
one thing shelved after another, as if they were already in the past,

needing nothing from you until, smashing itself on the tile floor,
the present cracks open the aftermath of itself.

From Tanka Diary

The botanical garden is just as I remember,
although it is certain that everything
has changed since my last visit.

How many hilarious questions these fuzzy
fiddleheads are inquiring of spring
will be answered as green ferns unfurl?

Walking the path, I stop to pick up
bleached bark from a tree, curled into
a scroll of ancient wisdom I am unable to read.

Even in my dreams I’m hiking
these mountain trails expecting to find a rock
that nature has shaped to remind me of a heart.

Hello, New Year

It’s one thing to be hopeful and to be full 
of feathers is another and it’s a third to 
conflate the two and do fourth things
even survive being thought of? 
Five fingers on fire close into a metaphor
about how we’ll never, never ever, never ever.
The smoke above the hospital is beautiful.
The smoke above the hospital was beautiful.
Above the hospital, the smoke looked 
and seemed, its seams dissolved 
into memory which is a terrible way 
to tell time in the cold. I misread 
the “Creve Coeur Camera” sign 
of the shop beside the supermarket 
as “Cri De Coeur Camera” like it is my job
to misread signs. Something beautiful arrived
in a helicopter, something beautiful left
forever. Here we go again, against,
aghast. Something in us floats, floated, 
our feet dragging through future ruins.
I know, “something” is an ulcer 
on any reaching, making intelligence
but the ulcer wants what it wants, to be 
something after all. For an awful whale,
a moment tries to beach itself, it does,
I learn Tomaž has died 
then it is a magnet of terrible power 
when I know for certain Tomaž has died. 
I convalesce, selfish as a branch punished
mildly by wind—Tomaž lived! and will,
but it’s only the kind of enough
nothing ever is. I feel I am being 
ironed, and it all only burns. I feel 
the subtraction machine subtracting
my maneuvers. I feel the abacus 
in my brain, that accordion, finally.
Finally licked into char. Five. Now any chair 
I steal into for any length of time 
has three unsteady legs. Cri cri cri, etc.
It would be a swell time to have a handle on
any methodology for rising into the sky, 
a really great time to turn into a bird. 
What a time! the sun is out and it is snowing
and I am as close to being a plastic sword
as I ever have been. How I would love 
some toddler coming into their tongues
or some beloved ancient to sentence me. 
How I will love the sound 
of my own final clatter, but 
only if it comes when I am tossed aside 
to signal the end of hostilities.