1.

First I wrote the story and then I wrote a letter to the story, which, in its own way, the story answered. The story was full of confidence and didn’t mind being questioned.

 

(The man’s voice stings and I reach to slap it, but it’s not there. It’s the voice of the story and it comes and goes. Sometimes when I cannot find it, I take its place and hope you will continue participating. It’s not something I can do without you, but it’s not something with you in it. I don’t even know my loneliness well.)

 

The letter to the story was feminine and seemed to be the queen of everything absent.

 

(I found it in the starlight of closets, my closets, but I’ll share them with all of you, who are wearing the possibility of your appearance.)

 

2.

a man who had become his shelf

put himself there a piece at a time

until no one was left to place the rest

 

a shelf won’t ask questions

and a shelf won’t leave you

but a shelf can hold you up inside

 

3.

You wash the story’s leaves, impatient with piddling on its roses, anxious for the nostril-heat of the creature who has broken her chain.

 

You feel bad for me and you start to release a sweet smell that grows slowly through itself to a vinegar, and I quickly cover my secret moans.

 

It’s only time the story kills, and the story tortures time, just as it tortures the sequence of you.

 

4.

like whiteness falling in a movie he’s fat

and soft and not as cold as you might expect

and always back when you’ve forgotten him

 

he suggests cubicles and ballast unknowing

a vegetable sound with a slight limp to it

invasive and surprising as substantial yellow

 

5.

I’ve watched the story’s roses drop their skirts and still hold on to a fragile stalk of thorns. It bought me some freedom, and I carried it around with me in a bottle I kept open.

 

Ask a woman on the street (and you’ll have to) and she’ll give you directions while holding her coat tighter and looking off into the distance at your future, which you, of course, can’t see.

 

(The internal sky of words and music with the warmth of yesterday bottled up still received us when we listened. I thought I saw cowboys and ducks on my shirt. It was a comfort and a replacement.)

 

I’m meaner than I look in my speech, so don’t expect surrender.

 

(The story’s administration of funds seemed to be dangling from a helium balloon, the kind with distant and tender cactus blooms. There were some escapees living in the condition that came after me, looking for substitutions in all the places you could hope to refund. Deep in the existential meadow, the itinerant insects were harvesting the leftovers of dehydrating rain.)

 

6.

the novelists next door with the blinds drawn at noon

steal away to someplace exotic with the advances

they negotiate for their most expansive shame

 

it’s what you throw out that makes you

verb what’s left so hastily on over to

the sultry old noun that needed a lift

 

7.

There’s a third darkness the fall blackbirds sometimes capture between them, and the second, which has already taken up residence in their bodies, gets lost in it while the first shakes my hand and opens the window, through which I can see that a tremble of dark ribbons was allowing one kind of knowledge, light’s clothing pulled tight by the horizon’s drawstring.

 

(The story counted evenings numberless. I stopped leaving. The irascible crone tenderly cupped her husband’s bent fist. So many worlds and this one claims you. The dark town bordering my desert sunk into something about the middle of its coal chute.)

 

It’s a good thing I scare so easily.

 

(Several good reasons for any death arrive, but they’re seldom our own. It looks bad for the point of view justifying our confusion. Reason is never the only reason. There’s a viewpoint that loves honesty more than truth.)

 

 

 

 

 

Now the young boy is waiting for the young girl

to stop hitting him on the head with the balloon hammer,

inflated and larger than life,

like their current situation.

 

Now the young girl is waiting for the hammer

to fall out of her hands and surprise her

with when and where it will attack, as if

her will were not needed for its deliberations.

 

Now the father and mother wait for the inevitable

retaliations and eventual tears, hoping

they will not come and believing

life offers other options.

 

Now the motive in this scene moves on

even while the young boy and the young girl,

the father and the mother, pause to absorb

what they can of its ambiguous motion.

 

Now the motion itself moves on, wielding

a still larger hammer. “But this is different,”

the quickly aging boy demands. “This is me

doing it to myself.”

 

“That’s why the hammer is larger now,”

says the young girl. “And shaped suspiciously

like tomorrow,” observes the tired hammer,

disguised as a judiciously deflated parent.

 

And now the explanatory cartoon is speeding up,

the jokes are crueler and everyone

is hammering everyone, which is also true,

but not so funny.

 

 

 

 

 

I ate an apple, indifferent. Not

me, the apple. I cared a great deal about

its sweet messy juice and the ever so

unwary bitter peel poised

innocently to wake me from the

commonplace acceptance of the expected.

But the apple’s response was hard to see,

no tree chastising, no bees tempted by

ferment, only me digging in and I was offering

nothing easily. I’d throw the core aside

because I’d no longer want to carry

anybody else’s future and anyway,

I wasn’t thinking. Which is why

I ate the apple.