Michael Robins is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently In Memory of Brilliance & Value (Saturnalia Books, 2015). He teaches literature and creative writing at Columbia College Chicago. For more information, visit his website, here. In Memory of Brilliance & Value can be purchased here.---------
from Square Etiquette
Dear Hadara,
What letter enters
within a day & leaves?
By any name, a river
divides two shore-
lines like a formality,
a great, hued stream.
Some cardinal flew—
in so doing, my morning
grew all handsome.
I will try my hands
as though for you
they were three.
Dear Hadara,
Our own unrelenting
flesh, the little death.
I thought the afternoon
different— Was, as any
other, somewhat nodding
& somewhat borrowed.
If, from some distance,
splinted chimneys pledge
a happy life, must we
comply? We each deny
la petite mort, even as
we succumb, one by one.
Dear Hadara,
Heard after the show
a rumor, a cathedral’s
first anchored stone.
To protect happiness,
shooed my older self
at the shore. No good—
Songs I’d never love
reside now under glass,
deep inside museums.
Otherwise by a hair,
my dead weight hangs
on the nail of a door.
[lift, drink water that carves these falls]
lift, drink water that carves these falls ankle crossing ankle
remove your clothes you’re little for a little while then you
point the boat and go who else do I tell this zoo in the air
invisible maw our old lives in a new shoe Magellan
rethinking his travels after the after-voyage faces bark
under the galaxy named for him other willing spirals or
flawed some medium, flightless bird with who else do I
indulge this guessing game weather to expose I hope
you’re a bean inside a jar any instrument in a cloud-shaped bag