The past is the same as anything else—we built it

and now we can’t kill it. We keep lurching

at it with the scoring ax and connecting

with the walls instead. That punishing season—

the hall light’s hiss, the door off its hinge—

I’m ready to stop remembering. The trouble is

there’s nobody else who can do it. A memory

isn’t a metal grille drawn down on a storefront

at night, then unlocked in the morning.

You can’t fake sick, call in. There’s no other person

to wake in the slate dawn, drive into downtown,

locate the recess, collapse the gate, maneuver

the thing out of view. There’s only you.

Home, Followed by Tall Buildings

Home, Followed by Tall Buildings

Why do I have to remember the whole

of the trauma, can’t we

split it—

You take the unburnt brick eye of the well

I’ll take the list of top spots for suicide, ranked

Remember after the funeral

the teenagers played charades

GODFATHER II—

First syllable: niece in her velvet

blazer, down on her knees and praying

Then waving her palms around her

in all directions

I knew it was GOD—

I knew it by how, like God, she pretended

to reach everywhere, but she didn’t

And Stay Out

And Stay Out

Rough days I’m trying to live

as though dead, to satisfy

or at least dampen the inclination

to actually die. I’m holding

mainly still. I’m forming my face

into no specific expression.

I’m lowering the lights

so I can’t see my poster

of one world leader grinning

and shattering, over the head

of another, a trick bottle

of champagne—a dead person

wouldn’t be looking at that,

or at anything. Stop thinking

about the theory that slaughter

has coarsened the population,

that the only ones who

managed to stay hale or half-well

in atrocious times were the ones

who wouldn’t share,

who would tear from smaller

arms damp rations and standardissue

disaster blankets—part

wool, part synthetic, resistant

to flame. Stop knowing that these

were the only people who lived

long enough to pass

themselves on. To breed.

Stop being absurd. And stop

saying breed. Dead

people don’t need that word.

Ohio on TV

Ohio on TV

Crucifixes on layaway. Absence of dead bolts.

Deep-fried sucralose.

Whole families living out of abandoned pianos.

Sometimes in cerebral hour-long dramas,

the characters must go to Ohio,

and this is the way it looks. How do they not know

it’s the same here as anywhere else:

the poverty is mundane, the wealth outrageous?

And no one is nice.

I myself return here only to party

with people who pummel me, to follow

them around like a patchy

dog in a TV scene that takes place

in Ohio. We walk by the oblong enclosure

where the city is staging its summer fling.