Room where we sit to eat meals,
where I do a lot of writing.
Tablecloth is vinyl, has
large floral print,
blue background. Walls are
covered with children’s art.
Plants on windowsill and
on one end of table.
Two wingback chairs —
both need to be reupholstered.
Ceiling is high.
Windsock made from
toilet paper tube, streamers
hangs from light fixture.
Dark red curtains tied in knots —
better view of neighbors’ yards,
small tree, squirrels that run
on power lines. Heat comes from
noisy steam radiator that clangs.

Awful is as awful does,
but I
can only aspire to
do fewer awful things
every day
for at least a month.
Goodness is tiring,
how it sets expectations
I can’t meet,
just like a report card.
Kings abdicate for
less than this, and
magistrates rule
neither for them nor
obdurately against.
Perhaps I can be
quite good,
really kind
someday, develop
that inner resolve,
utter discipline,
valor, and
will. You
X-ray my chest,
you look in my heart,
zip it closed again.

We never saw the ships at night when we stood
on the shore awaiting them, the return of
all the men we loved, all the men we didn’t
love anymore, but

felt we owed something, a feigned concern at least,
in exchange for promises made before the
voyage that was more important than what we
felt or hoped or dreamed.

The sun came up, and we went back to our homes,
the sailors still unaccounted for, the ships
quite probably lost with all aboard. We have
learned, in these eight months,

other occupations than entertaining
gentlemen who then must go, heeding some call
greater than our own, with barely a goodbye.
I am a baker

now; I must tend to my bread, the dough that yields
under my hands, is transformed by my caress.
Bread becomes me as I eat, it never leaves
by death or by sea.

If I had a dime for every nickel I’ve spent—
forget it. I never was any good at math.
Each dime is a drop of water, and I dream
of it sliding cool and thin down my throat.
But then I’d be weighted down, even more
than I am now, even less able to achieve
lift-off of any kind, even more earthbound.
If I had enough dimes, though, I could buy
a space station and a launcher to get there.
Or I could pour them all into a dime room,
swim and dive in them like Scrooge McDuck.
I bet that’s sublime, too. And changing.

A narrow shaft is seen
at your feet—too cool
for corn at noon.

A whiplash in the sun;
it was gone. I feel for
a transport but

never
a tighter breathing
and

An erasure from Emily Dickinson’s “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass.”

Maybe you would like to know
what my hair smelled like when I was born, or
what I thought about when I reached for
dust mote sunbeams and my hand came back
empty. Maybe I wonder about you in your
stiff white shoes, your hair a different color
than it is now because the second your life
begins, it sets about to change you. Maybe
years later, you and I rode down two different
hills on two different banana-seat bikes in two
different states and wondered about each other,
in a way, whether this thing that has happened,
ever would happen. But most likely, we were
thinking only about the wind, the gnats, our
sweat, how not to add new scabs to our
old ones and, as always, how not to hear
our mothers calling us home.

Once, there was a little bat whose nose was made of gold leaf.
She flew on wings of silver floss when the moon was so low
it almost touched the quiet ground where field mice ran along,
pulled on threads they couldn’t feel, by an unknown, unseen hand
as the bat stopped at all the flowers waiting in her realm,
gathering pollen, nectar, and their dreams of children yet
unborn. That whole world waits now for her return, on a night
when the sky is a picnic blanket of stars, and the feast
begins anew, the bat awakening her wings for flight.