what journeys are yet to be taken.

Romance

ROMANCE

Remember how you waited for your first French kiss,

that exotic term for what turned out to be the shock

of an oily eel entering your mouth;

remember a boy’s arm flung over your shoulder,

his sweaty hand inching down your blouse

like a snail moving toward a cabbage leaf,

remember being finger-fucked in some house under construction

and the kid who spied on you masturbating in your bedroom

and how you grew up believing anyway that romance

was going to tuck you under its tender white wing

and carry you off to someplace where you’d never notice

all the flies getting married to the corpses

of bloated deer and raccoons by the roadside,

or the man outside the corner store, engaged

to every dusty bottle on the shelf, or the penned cows

yearning for the hammer to the skull, for something certain;

still here you are, in middle age, stunned

to find yourself in a sushi bar in California

with a man kneeling before you

while the little wooden sampans drift past

with their cargoes of dead tuna and seaweed,

and he is not asking you for anything

but to stay exactly where you are, to please not disappear

while he goes to feed the parking meter,

and the man behind the counter is nodding and smiling,

raising his cleaver aloft and taking aim

and letting it fall

sharp and precise on the glistening bodies of fish.

Miniatures

MINIATURES

I love those vodka bottles on the plane

you can line up on your tray table,

and the miniature blackberry preserves

in the boutique hotel, where in the bathroom

there are little soaps and lotions, a sewing kit

with enough thread for one button, a needle

with an eye so tiny it’s invisible. Once in a museum

I saw sculptures that required a microscope

to make out the three birds perched

on a single filament of hair; the artist worked,

it was said, between heartbeats, because the pulse

in his thumb could ruin everything. I love

that there’s a realm in which we’re giants,

crashing through the shrubs and sending

the lizards skittering, scattering the methodical ants

who toil toward the rotted log with leaves

twice their size. I love not looking up

into the measureless black fathoms

of space, which only make me think

of the enormous darkness of the future

no matter what the scientists say

about all that past light streaming in.

Years ago, I built a dollhouse

for my daughter, from a kit. It took

months of fitful work, but finally

I glued the last wood chip to the roof,

set the furniture in place,

and we moved the family in. I loved

to watch Dad peeing in the kitchen

and Mom dancing in the clawfoot tub

while Baby somersaulted up the stairs.

At night, when they and my daughter

had been tucked into bed, I loved

to stand over them,