A Bowl of Spaghetti (audio only)
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
Find and share the perfect poems.
Curious to see caverns, we detoured in Tennessee to ramble through Fat Man's Misery, past a ballroom and gun powder machine till we reached The World's Second Largest Underground Lake— on which my husband had promised a ride in a glass-bottom boat. There, a kid hunched over a hot-rod magazine. Dan, I think his name was, radiant, in clammy, artificial light. I asked Dan, college-break? He nodded inside his hoodie then helped me into the glass-bottom hold. I peered into the milky water and watched the seeded trout swim up for the chum he dumped overboard on our account. He was milky white, himself, from months of cave sitting. I wondered if he'd write a poem on a summer spent underground. Thought to suggest it—how foolish— then wondered if what I really wanted was Dan, as I stepped into his boat, to take my arm and ask me something— at this middle age, probably for a couple coins then give a promise of safe passage as he ferried me to the realm of the dead that I've been thinking about for several years not because of a girlfriend's cancer but because my body is no longer young. I mean, lovely— and that there's no turning back to that water's edge. There's only the couch every afternoon at four o'clock and not wanting to ever move. Not wishing to die exactly— just not wanting to rise because the light feels so pressured. And I can't have that ardent glow reflected back while brushing teeth or fastening a necklace. Now there's this casting around for other stuff— the daughters' secrets—the pathetic urge to write about their secrets— or a crush on Charon. Not an old man as it turns out but a youth, colorless and tired of his i-Pod. No, he's not really of interest to me. And this is my secret: that I wish he were— as with those arms reaching through clouds of cigarette smoke to lead me into reeking dives. I'm past that. And he, Dan, not the poetic Charon— will probably climb out of the caverns into the six o'clock evening sun. Stretch. Change his shirt, eat his mother's meatloaf and head off in a rusted Honda for the Piggly-Wiggly parking lot with a six-pack and a girl, those hand-sized moths flitting in the light as the sheriff chases the kids to another dead end spot— those enormous dusty moths my husband caught for me to hold in my hand because he knows, in the afternoon light after the dank caverns, how fluttery the furry wings will feel. Which is more than melodrama can bear. To have wished for Dan to ask me something? I know the passage is not what you wanted to hear.
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
Before doctors learn how it is that the brain’s lights turn on, they may have to know a lot more about what’s happening when the lights are off.
—Benedict Carey
In her dark she surveys empty: the vanity
from the in-law's Bronx apartment,
the brooch from a lover,
loafers by a coat tree, trench coat,
the husband's profile, an alarm
for news and forecast. Here
she appraises fidelity
before the light violates.
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
Flashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clung to the dark of it: the legs of the spider held the tucked wings close, held the abdomen still in the midst of calling with thrusts of phosphorescent light-- When I am tired of being human, I try to remember the two stuck together like burrs. I try to place them central in my mind where everything else must surround them, must see the burr and the barb of them. There is courtship, and there is hunger. I suppose there are grips from which even angels cannot fly. Even imagined ones. Luciferin, luciferase. When I am tired of only touching, I have my mouth to try to tell you what, in your arms, is not erased.