ENTRY FOR THE LENGTH OF THE WORLD

sighing gets us no where — every day trains pass through the sunless corridor of a very particular kind of failure — I go back to where I came from: the mediocrity of highways, the emptiness of a bench on an empty golf course, pissing in the holes with the half moon trembling, this can’t be right — I know the hand that traces your hipbone — but frankly, I was just loving a shadow of myself — in letters I ask: would you like to go to the seaside & throw stones for a while? or fuck in the creaky space of a telephone booth? could we listen to “out on the weekend” while driving along fields of hay bales & salt licks? is it the length of the world that bothers you?

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ENTRY FOR PAST PARTICIPLE

my mother wore the high sun on her shoulders — at a drafting table in the basement, she made technical drawings of airplane parts for not enough money — she’s inside of the trouble I have with flat grey skies & the jokes I rarely make — was haunting, she called it, past participle such as “was loving” & “has loved” — I often wonder where the sadness got lodged in — where it sings from — why it eats all the leaves down — in her twenties, she felt the spirits kicking under the bed, woke to the sprung hairpins rearranged on the dresser — was visited — then she walked through the kitchen of a church where her friend lived, every cabinet door flung open — it was then that she used her own eyelids to call in the dark

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ENTRY FOR THE UNTRAINED EYE

roaming a long time now — my blood murky with too many stars — loaves of bread hardening in the night — the glove compartment full of pointillist maps — to the untrained eye, becoming someone gives me something to do: a sparrow trapped in a coffin

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ENTRY FOR SWAN & SNAKE

the shadows of his face, the fast pricks ( so . . . breathing through tiny holes ) — the knuckles that keep her jaw closed — when I think of myself a girl, the distance she feels between her body ( coiled up like a baby snake ) & her spirit ( coiled up like a baby snake ) — skip fast to something better: mother cow, the crisp ridge of a paper airplane, an embroidered tulip on the breast pocket, the world is only a peach pit — the therapist: feel the edges of the chair, then: name five things beginning with the letter B: bars, 11 baby teeth in a clam pink Bakelite dish, the twine that splits her in quadrants — at 11, she is a swan who has lost her neck, whose feet hang from my shoulders

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ENTRY FOR WEIGHING PEACHES

we are in a grocery store in Akron, weighing peaches — in most aisles, we feel a glare — I hold her hand even though I am also letting go — an old ruin is inside me — a holding cell at fifteen, the feel of a jammed up air duct — white enamel chipping off the bars in little slivers, bars that vibrate cold through my teeth when I clench my jaw down — just as clover cloaks the foothills & there is a sense of basic goodness somewhere

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ENTRY FOR COLD LEAVES

we find pleasure in a cool alleyway after the bar lets us out — the want waiting on the tongue inside of everything — my aching awake — I move in & out of her, coil what I can get of her cropped dark hair in my other fist & she stutters, spits, turns against the wide pores of the brick wall, arching the small of her back, moving her ass into my hand — until now, just another day of the light entering edgewise, half closed eyes, a key that ruins the lock — but in the dampness of cold leaves she shows me a simplicity — not the blueprint — but the stain on the fingertip as the map

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Six Entries