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.

Book of Hours

i.
I don’t hold time
too close at hand.
I know minutes
are the brown leaves
of evergreens—sharp little
useless things, fallen;
I discard them
like fruit peels.
Never in knowing, but
slipping on the
mealy brown coils,
sensing it’s
time to go.

ii.
Time is a blenching bird
in the back yard of
the inaccurate.
It shivers and flinches, always
a moment out of reach, and
you beg to know
how the warm of its body,
how those feathers would feel
between your fingers.

(A pulsing thing,
smooth with the silk
of meaning never
to be caught.)

iii.
The face of time
is smooth with wear.
A shining silver circle,
a quarter with the visage
worn to dullness
from years in a
warm pocket.
When I come late I’ve been
polishing the shine,
illuminating
the gelatin print
of months and
years of
holding onto.

iv.
The opposite of gray
is gray. The opposite of time is
a swollen river in shifting autumn.
A lying child. Ash that floats on water,
the aching moan of
wet snow beneath
bare feet.

v.
Sometimes I can feel time
with its bare feet
folding and refolding itself
inside my stomach
because it means for me to.

vi.
The opposite of time is
time in negative,
time living
a life its own
without numbers
somewhere in Western Illinois
among the cornfields,
maybe sitting, maybe pacing,
always just
taking its time.

Lunch at the Molly Pitcher Inn

I squint against
the brightness of early-afternoon
beyond the picture window,
because the man at the table to my right
is alone and ordering for two: She’s stuck
at the train tracks. We’ll both
have the chicken, and the man
at the table to my left has
a tributary of dried blood trailing
from his ear. He is laughing,
which makes it worse
because I know he knows
what is sad about this place,
what is sad about a wife who
can’t quite look at you
in focus.

And they know
Autumn is poorer in hope
than winter, because
they know what will come.
The beginning
is so far from the end
that it is an end in itself.

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
and cold little houses huddled on a hill
remember the cranberries and cobalts
that painted their faces in
hungrier days.