ARTIFACTS
My Lucky Numbers are 12, 7, 11, 28, 32, and 16.
On the boardwalk a small blue card tells
my past and present: I hurt people with words.
I was nature’s stepchild.
No one knows how I got here.
I float three inches under the surface.
Waves move above me and whirlpool my hair.
Sand shifting on sand is musical and dry
like your hand passing over my haunch.
My fortune says I walk a thorny path.
A tiny bruise, purple as murex, stains my throat.
I am torn with longing for many unnameable things.
I push my hands through water to show you what I need.
I am a very impulsive individual.
One of these days I’ll awake to a peaceful world
and great happiness will be mine.
HOW AM I
Considering the bay shore, lapped
like the palate of god’s stupid mouth
Considering my husband and considering me, lost
in the same room, where are you, where are we
Considering the mirror, breaking its own heart
each time I trouble it with my face
Considering the fine edge of terror
the morning brings and also the night
Considering how I eat envy like a fawn
noses furled lilies
Considering time, so casual
in its lazy dismantling of me
Considering the silverfish, consuming
my poems with a diligent hunger
Considering fathers
considering them especially
Considering my body
Considering anxiety, the urn I must fill
and fill
Consider fleeing
Considering the way a road goes on
and on and on and on with horses and fences and everything
IT
It, I understand it
I am afraid of it, the endlessness
of it and the end of it.
No, you can’t unlight that match.
Imagine, taking it all back, birds
soaring down not up, smoke
curling in on itself like a comma
unborn; this house, exhausted,
folding into clean planks that take root
in a tangle of shadowed forest.
The front door furs with moss, trillium
sheer enough for light to slice right through
so call it a window, whatever, don’t ask me.
Words are over now and also thought.
The thing is, the thing is
the end and endless are the same,
the snake choking on its tail. There’s nowhere to go
there is no where.
