break up on bed after white bed sobbing,

doing all the dishes

except the one his mouth touched,

burying my grief

in the thaw-wet yard,

turning mud into water miraculous?

What are you here to collect?

Spring, I can see, is in full effect

allowing grass-reeds-wild-river-

birch-flood-plains & even robins

are compelled by the way this

broke the hell out of that’s ripped heart.

Slow. I’m taking it with Ecclesiastes.

A time for a time for a time.

Yes, hawk, the winter was disappointing,

but we’ve left scraps.

Beetles have arrived like shorn locusts

shedding what I remember

of the summer when the trees buzzed with wings & shells

the leaves alive / alive

it leaves the problem of remembering

without erasing it—

for all of March I’ve felt the water rising

& I’ve measured what I knew.

Oh hawk, what’s your damage—

are you here to pick the bones

of the years I laid waste to

like I never loved a thing? So be it.

I see the beetles march across the linoleum

& I let them.

Can’t feed young trees to the chipper

can’t suck the dirt out of my nails

but I can stand here reciting all the words I have

over the hole & that’s what’s left—

Done with the whole dark

& the insect dirge

under blue lit lamps.

Done trying to remember

June, first stars & August

when I was Penelope

when I was Eurydice

when July was missing

& I was my own dull shade.

Listen to me, I’m not hiding it—

I’m swimming out to meet the boats

coming armed up the river

& I wish he were watching

through a lead-black fog.

I had his book of exits learned by heart.

I thought I knew it.

MARCH IS MARCH

We go on forward. I go on floating my face

in a map of Lake Michigan, blue there

as logically as anywhere else. When he leaves I stop

washing the cups; I stop cleaning the floors.

I don’t have the patience to identify whether dirt is different

in the hue of his absence, if there is less of it,

if it possesses a graver, more articulate

sense of itself, grown worldly in suffering.

Water lurks in the drain like it’s gawking.

My mother says Why not date yourself for a while.

Accordingly, I listen to all seven Harry Potters.

I go for long walks in a circle & insult Scalia on facebook

because I’m trying to win me over & these are my interests.

The radio is a dick to me. Pop songs are barbed with revelations

that make the people who listen to pop songs return

with a change of heart. Rihanna, I tweet. I need you to be okay

& not okay at the same time as me, together in a cycle.

I adopt a dog I keep as my shadow.

Every morning she cries when I leave & I think Finally someone gets it.