for the branch that could save me & you’d half

wake up & push me away

or maybe

you’d murmur from whatever room you were

wandering, whatever bed

you were circling above, & moving to your stomach

I’d breathe you in

to my own landscape, a field overgrown

trailing on into the sky, a crow hovering around a spigot

washing its oily head, an old woman at a fork

pointing the way, until my tongue opened you &

soft birds let loose their grip on the earth

& your sleeping hands found my hair & pulled me

deeper inside & we’d imagine we were awake

& I’d forgotten who I was

but if I thought hard I could remember, beginning

with my eyes…

Twenty-Pound Stone

It nests in the hollow of my pelvis, I carry it with both hands, as if

offering my stomach, as if it were pulling me forward.

At night the sun leaks from it, it turns cold, I sleep with it

beside my head, I breathe for it.

I dream of stones.

Sometimes I dream of hammers.

I am hammering it back into sand, the sand we melt into glass,

the glass we blow into bottles.

This stone is fifteen green bottles with nothing inside.

It never bleeds, it never heals, it is a soup can left on the back shelf,

the label worn off.

It is the corner of a house, the beginning of a wall.

At night it changes shape, it lies on one side, casting jagged shadows.

It brightens where my tongue touches it.

Richard’s eyes were this color, a pale fruit, honeydew.

When I swing it over my head I swear it could lift me.

If I jump from a bridge it would drag me down, the current couldn’t

carry us, it has no lungs, no pockets of air.

If I could walk it to the center of a frozen pond & leave it,

in the spring it would be gone

Some Ether

I don’t know if you can read this now, you

without a body, without a hand on the wheel….

For years physicists were searching outerspace

for some ether electromagnetic waves

could travel through.

It was Einstein who said,

you can’t find it because it isn’t there….

Your hair would be gray now.

You led me upstairs to my great-grandmother’s bed

her hair floating white above her skull

as if it had already left her.

I never knew her not to be blind.

She reached out to read my face

your hands firm on my back.

you can’t find it because it isn’t there

You without a body without a compass without oars

your hands are useless in this world,

resting on my shoulders

trying to steer.

God Forgotten

God mercifully forgets us for a few hours.

A blind woman in a folding chair

rests in the sun on the sidewalk below

& for an afternoon

doesn’t think about heaven. I put my hand on yours