Thank You

“If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,”
“If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,”
“Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.”
“What women wander?
Not many. All. A few.”
“No one grumbles among the oyster clans,
And lobsters play their bone guitars all summer.”
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
“I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,”
“Peace lily, arrowhead, aloe—
the last time you went to rehab
all your houseplants died. Absence parched
the heart of your terra-cotta pots.”
“When the dead return
they will come to you in dream
and in waking, will be the bird
knocking, knocking against glass, seeking”
“She does not know
her beauty,
she thinks her brown body
has no glory.”
“We have almost nothing left,
no ground in common.
At best, a brand
or maybe a miniseries.”
“I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.”
“Seeing photos
of ancestors
a century past”
“It will not stay.
But this morning we wake to pale muslin
stretched across the grass.”
“Some of us were arriving, hungry
impatient, while others had eaten
and were leaving, bidding goodbye”
“When you caught one to keep,
we took it home and I asked you to teach me.
You showed me how to spike the brain—
I thanked the fish, looked away, pressed down.
We bled it, shaved away the scales,
severed meat from bone.”