shipped from my brain stem

to my thalamus. And his news

about my grave illness was only

a synaptic frisson

deep in my cortex; I woke up

and was not dying. And my mother

was not slumped in the backseat

of a car she was supposed to be driving,

weeping, confused about where she lived.

But then, sadly, I had to realize

that the woman at the party

who told me, Write faster

and assured me of a prestigious literary prize

was also a chimera, as was the man

kissing me passionately under a tree—

its bright leaves evaporating

above our heads,

his tongue dissolving in my mouth

leaving only a gluey taste

I rinsed away with my coffee.

Already I’m forgetting what felt

like a great love, forgetting that world

which for the short while I lived there

had me fooled into believing

it was the only world; now

it is beginning to vanish,

along with everyone in it,

and this is their only elegy.

In Dreams

IN DREAMS

After eighteen years there’s no real grief left

for the man who was my father.

I hardly think of him anymore,

and those dreams I used to have,

in which he’d be standing in a room of people

I didn’t know—maybe his new friends,

if the dead have friendships—

those dreams no longer trouble my sleep.

He’s not in the crooked houses I wander through

or in the field by the highway

where I’m running, chasing down

some important piece of paper,

desperate to reach it

as it’s lifted in the wake of trucks

or flattened and marked by passing cars,

as it’s lifted again to swirl over

a broken wood fence. I don’t know why

the paper’s so important, or if anything

is even written there.

I don’t know where the dead go,

or why it’s good to forget them,

not to see them if they come crowding

the windows or trying to lay themselves down

and press along our bodies at night

and ask that we love them again,

that our sorrows include them once more.

This morning I couldn’t get up.

I slept late, I dreamed of the single

sheet of paper, which I never managed to reach

as it stuttered and soared over the grass

and a few flowers, so that I woke

with a sense of loss, wondering who

or what I had to mourn besides

my father, whom I no longer mourn,

father buried in the earth beneath grass,

beneath flowers I trample as I run.

The Work

THE WORK

I can’t bear anymore what happens to the body,

how it begins to get ready, the skin drawing back

just slightly from the bones, the bones not

brittle yet but starting to abrade, the blood

slowing down in its thickening tunnels and sewers.

I don’t want to see how the glossy hairs are leached