The eye traps it so where heaven should be

you see shadows. You start to reek.

That’s you moving on.

Crow Says Goodbye

CROW SAYS GOODBYE

There is a white stone cliff

over a dropping slope

sliced along with bare trees.

In the center of the cliff

is a round dry fountain of polished stone.

By seizing my whole body up as I clench my hand

I am able to open the fountain

into a drain, revealing below it the sky,

the trees, a brown and uncertain ground.

This is how my heart works, you see?

This is how love works?

Have some sympathy for the great spasms

with which I must open myself to love

and close again, and open.

And if I leapt into the fountain, there is just no telling:

I might sever myself clean, or crack the gold bloom of my head,

and I don’t know what uncertain ground I might fold on like a sack.

Appeal to My First Love

APPEAL TO MY FIRST LOVE

You can only swallow when I swallow—

you swallow every time you see me swallow.

The coloring book fills with love, over and over—

you turn each page over, blotting them red.

It’s a flipbook as stultifying and repetitive as your heart when it adores me.

It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever laid eyes on.

Flipbook of sky in love,

the flipbook of true love.

Come back, this cereal is gross, these cartoons are whiny.

Adore me to sleep before sleep can adore me on its own terms.

The Big Loser

THE BIG LOSER

The guardian angel sits in the tree

above the black lip of street

the man walks down.

He calls the man Cargo.

The angel sees a pinewood box in place of the man,

and the street he walks is a boat,

the hull like a coal crater.

Somewhere in the real world there is such a boat and box.

The angels call these overlays dreams

and believe they crop up because angels

can’t sleep but want to—

space falls apart when you have unlimited time.

*

The cargo is rattling in the boat.

Maybe it’s just the waves, maybe it’s rats.

What’s the difference? Either way: it’s the box.

The angel sends the man

a happy vision from his past—the time

he fed birthday cake

to his goldfish

after an unsuccessful party.

The angel thinks he’s applying lemon oil

to the creaky, wounded wood of the box.

He knows it’s palliative, but it’s beautiful.

*

The man reaches the end of the street. He’s a sick man

and he starts to ponder death

as he often does these days:

All of death is right here

—the gods, the dark, a moon.

Where was I expecting death

to take me if everywhere it is

is on earth?

At life’s close, you’re like the child whose parents

step out for a drive—