Dear Life
I can’t undo all I have done to myself,
what I have let an appetite for love do to me.
I have wanted all the world, its beauties
and its injuries; some days,
I think that is punishment enough.
Often, I received more than I’d asked,
which is how this works—you fish in open water
ready to be wounded on what you reel in.
Throwing it back was a nightmare.
Throwing it back and seeing my own face
as it disappeared into the dark water.
Catching my tongue suddenly on metal,
spitting the hook into my open palm.
Dear life: I feel that hook today most keenly.
Would you loosen the line—you’ll listen
if I ask you,
if you are the sort of life I think you are.
Wound is the Origin of Wonder
The bee that worshiped the mouths of those flowers
dropped to your window like a spent priest,
its thud comedic in the coded silence.
You were making a change to the order of your hours,
had announced as much in the prior moment,
and if I thought of Virgil’s Georgics, it was only
not to mention them. I brought my eye
to its abdomen, offered an ounce of my human life.
What would you do with the knowledge
that I’d grieve for a bee? Someone like me
could be played by the threat of endings.
I’ll lose you one day, have lost you always,
a long ongoing Westwardness of thought.
It’s not metaphor that bees make honey
of themselves while language only dreams
the hunted thing. Let’s be hungry a little
while longer. Let’s not hurt each other if we can.
Letters in Winter
There is not one leaf left on that tree
on which a bird sits this Christmas morning,
the sky heavy with snow that never arrives,
the sun itself barely rising. In the overcast
nothingness, it’s easy to feel afraid,
overlooked by something that was meant
to endure. It’s difficult today to think
clearly through pain, some actual,
most imagined; future pain I try lamely
to prepare myself for by turning your voice
over in my mind, or imagining the day
I’ll no longer hug my father, his grip
tentative but desperate all the same.
At the café, a woman describes lilacs
in her garden. She is speaking of spring,
the life after this one. It will be spring,
I say over and over. I see how winter
is forbidding: it grows the heart
by lessening everything else and demands
that we keep trying. I am trying.
But oh, to understand us,
any one of us, and not to grieve?
