Poetry

Splinter is another name for distraction between us
when the woodstove’s gone cold.
We wait a year to feed the baby

honey, a few more to give her wine,
deem the green paint too green, that vines
might be stenciled against it, but in the dim

Texas boys in drag walk fast,
wear wide skirts, for running,

say “ma’am” to the woman
who sells them cigarettes

O love, piss on a stick,
sex by the calendar,
our OB’s German porn,
blue pills, and IUIs

The beautiful, the ruined—
what doesn’t end
as stillness after all,

Merrimack frozen over, gulls circling
from the landfill seem lost, reeling across

what flowed only days ago. The old men
huddled beside the boathouse tell tales

Cathedrals rise over cobblestone towns.
Because this life is brief we learn to write
our names in granite. There is elegy
because this life is brief. We make stories
from patterns we come across in the stars

In the green it happens
of an avocado
green where the ink

of its buttery covenant with yokey yellow
striates
and births its perfect stone

Faith’s other shapes,
marsh light, seedpod, reeds
disembodied pollen

Light has its way with dark
stalks furrow earth,
the risk of green

Required: nothing. No bloody
chair, no truncheon, no white

light. No pen, no pad. No
evidence. No electronic