Poetry

I  am  weary  of  my  own  death,  its  flagrant  hospitality,  the  stone  mug  in  which  it proffers the best cocoa. Photographs of obscure ancestors line its mantelpiece; bits of cut glass litter death’s settee. I have come here to exchange doves with my death, and already I am sick to the spleen of death, of doves.

There were bones everywhere, in the ground, resting on the surface, wedged in the crevices of trees, human bones, animal bones, bones of unimaginable beings, strange bones. So that could be the jawbone of an angel, you said: the spleen-bone, the miter-bone.

This catbird, inches outside, in full view to me, but hidden in the holly from another perspective, keeps darting from phrase to phrase until its stream of unconsciousness brings my mother to mind

sucking into themselves like I shied inward when asked, How is your father?

I was reading about exoplanets, places where there might be life, places with open seating, place settings made of iron and clay, where no one’s heart is closed

in the morning after

Lady Horikawa wrote about her tangled hair

later the poet ordained as a nun

Against an achromatic morning sky
in the pewter kink of a scrub oak limb
a gray squirrel, tensed in a quivering coil.

In the woods on the other side
of your chain link fence where does
and fawns paw at the frozen dusk
and a lone fox slinks across a clearing
on the prowl for something vulnerable

My too-soon-dead ex and I honeymooned
in a rented cottage on Sanibel Island.
We walked the beach that first afternoon,

noting the pink scalloped roof
that would guide us back to our boardwalk.

It begins with the smallest of breaths:
a cough, a voice split into seven veins. We joke with the coolness of broader perspective, suavely side-eye our parents.