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We rose like two
blue balloons.
You, especially
full of hot air.
And blue because
that's the color
of bursts and flickers
I see when I close
my eyes from cold
and crying on the slab
of city sidewalk
I lost and then found
my coat's blue button on—
and the same small square
where I stood while you,
silent and still
on the other line,
deflated.

West

Colorado was beautiful. I walked barefoot in the snow on a mountain and saw black swans and met his family and rode on a train straight into the bottom of a gorge.

Just so you know,

my poems have been not so good lately because Joshua told me to write twenty poems before I go to Colorado. I go to Colorado tomorrow. I have six poems. The next poem I write will hopefully be about the Doppler Effect. I've been trying to write a poem about the Doppler Effect for weeks now. I've decided I'm going to start writing normal things (things like this, things like the thing I am writing) in here because sometimes I think normal thoughts, not always poem-thoughts. I can't wait until Colorado. I will climb mountains.

This week I read this

many times over.

The great mouth of the west hangs open,
mountain incisors beginning to bite
into the pink flesh of the sundown.
The end of another day
in this floating dream of a life.
Renown is a mouthful, here and there.

(sometimes it is almost perfect)

December Poem

The last few days of the old year
are the most static by far.
Slow mold growing
on old meat; hard, stale things
days before the taking-out.

Nights before the new year:
gameshow re-runs and
falling asleep in my jeans
around seven. Waking in the dark, then
whole days of left-overs.

After dinner on
the twenty-sixth, we wound
each music-making thing in the house
at the same time.

Tens of simultaneous dings
rang together: notes
lonely themselves,
cacaphonous at once.

The last one left playing
Greensleeves, sole and eerie,
unwinding slow, stopping just
before the finish.

Frying Eggs on Christmas Morning

Still dull blue outside,
a dawn drowned in
deafening street light,
blinding cricket-buzz.

Mornings I know
the kinetics of being
torn apart: stiff white,
bleeding yolk.

Lunch, the Day Before Thanksgiving (Revised)

My grandmother’s skin hangs looser on her arms
than I remember. She tugs down fleece sleeves
when she notices I’m looking.
My soup has cooled, my spoon
forgotten and limp
among the onions.

Outside, vacant docks
line the Navesink in blank Autumn
and cold little houses huddled on a hill
remember the cobalts and cranberries
that painted their faces
in hungrier days.

Through the bright afternoon
picture window, I squint
over Sandy Hook toward Coney Island.
Brooklyn is tiny and fogged, delicate
from a distance—New Jersey
knows everything
through gray-tinted lenses.

Scandinavia (Revised)

i. Coastal Conifer Forest

We took three quiet buses
from Stockholm to Sarpsborg,
each an inching gray caterpillar
crawling carefully over
the feet and toes of mountains.

Passing blurred scenes,
we watched the windows like they were
water-spotted movie screens—
The setting: streets stretched like tendons
between city and country;
the main characters:
spruce, juniper.

ii. Oceanic Boreal Zone

Our boat hummed its way
along the dotted line separating
Swedish and Norwegian Atlantic.
The motor quit with a final resigned sigh
off the coast of a windy, nameless island.

I skinned my palms on tree bark,
tying up the boat as your Norwegian cousin
told us, translating,
that only one man has lived here
in recent history.

From this archipelago strewn
sloppily between Sweden and Norway,
we dug a hole in the rocky coast and started a fire
as the boat's tethers moaned
against splintered makeshift pilings.

The sun set two hours after midnight
with the certainty of sermon.

Almost-Haiku

The moon hung upside down,
spun strange in god's glass hands, limp,
curled soft into a frown.

In Days of Marrowless Youth

The sky hangs loose over the backyard,
neon dusk: a faint and flustered pink
while the clouds cough snow.

Cold, drenched:
my bones feel too new to
hold much, pull their weight.

I am aging backwards toward the new year,
fractured afterthought
in limbo before the ice storm.

Nap

I've been dreaming like jet streams.
White fading glints,
disintegrating in daylight—
most important are the shapes.
The dizzying arabesques of regret when
consciousness reminds me
how to properly
tread water and
wait.