I’ve lost something and I can’t describe
what it is

line

and what if that’s my job
to say how empty an absence is

line

like rolling 2 gears together
and maybe teeth are missing in one
or both

line

or maybe trying to grind
two stones that are
polished and smoothed

line

I’ve always liked 
a little grit

line

but sand in my shoes
or in my hair

line

is like shattering
a glass in carpet
and using a broom to
get it out

line

I can’t describe
what it’s like to
sit on opposite ends
of a park bench and
not know how
to get any closer

line

I miss so many things
and I’ve looked through my piggy
bank and only found pennies

line

a pile of things that are
almost completely worthless

line

a shoebox full of sporks
a well with a bucket and a rope
that’s too short

line

sometimes in my room
it’s so dark that if I wake
up I won’t know if it’s morning or night

line

imagine being someplace you know
so well but are lost and don’t have any idea
how to get out

line

the rule is, put your right hand out
lay it on the wall, and follow

line

sometimes the rules don’t apply to all of us
I don’t want to sleep here again tonight

Related Poems

Daedalus, After Icarus

Boys begin to gather around the man like seagulls.
He ignores them entirely, but they follow him
from one end of the beach to the other.
Their footprints burn holes in the sand.
It’s quite a sight, a strange parade:
a man with a pair of wings strapped to his arms
followed by a flock of rowdy boys.
Some squawk and flap their bony limbs.
Others try to leap now and then, stumbling
as the sand tugs at their feet. One boy pretends to fly
in a circle around the man, cawing in his face.

We don’t know his name or why he walks
along our beach, talking to the wind.
To say nothing of those wings. A woman yells
to her son, Ask him if he’ll make me a pair.
Maybe I’ll finally leave your father.
He answers our cackles with a sudden stop,
turns, and runs toward the water.
The children jump into the waves after him.
Over the sound of their thrashes and giggles,
we hear a boy say, We don’t want wings.
We want to be fish now.

Loss

Lately I have been a gap.
Moth clouds follow me to bed.
I counted them: twenty, fifty, block, choke.

In the room where I used to sleep
a breath hangs low on the bed
and hoarsens the room.
No one knows where the air is
charged and released into the world,
but it thistles.

This is how breathing fills a house
with family: breathing to draw
the buzzing to its source
and breathing to lacquer a plugged maze.

How a house fully beamed and walled
is not a house, but a husk.
How a life in the span of a few breaths
becomes a clockless thing.

The Way One Animal Trusts Another

              Somewhere between what it feels like, to be at
one with the sea, and to understand the sea as
mere context for the boat whose engine refuses
finally to turn over: yeah, I know the place—
stumbled into it myself, once; twice, almost.  All
around and in between the two trees that
grow there, tree of compassion and—much taller—
tree of pity, its bark more bronze, the snow
              settled as if an openness of any kind meant, as well,
a woundedness that, by filling it, the snow
might heal…You know what I think? I think if we’re
lost, you should know exactly where, by now; I’ve
watched you stare long and hard enough at the map
already…I’m beginning to think I may never
not be undecided, about all sorts of things: whether
snow really does resemble the broken laughter
              of the long-abandoned when what left comes back
big-time; whether gratitude’s just a haunted
space like any other.  This place sounds daily
more like a theater of war, each time I listen to it—
loss, surprise, victory, being only three of the countless
fates, if you want to call them that, that we don’t
so much live with, it seems, as live for now among.  If as
close as we’re ever likely to get, you and I, is this—this close—