as your sequined dress, and you feel

as complete as you’ll ever feel,

moving through all your true and beautiful lives

while the real one pales.

TWO

TWO

Death Poem

DEATH POEM

Do I have to bring it up again, isn’t there another subject?

Can I forget about the scrap of flattened squirrel fur

fluttering on the road, can I forget the road

and how I can’t stop driving no matter what,

not even for gas, or love, can I please not think

about my father left in some town behind me,

in his blue suit, with his folded hands,

and my grandmother moaning about her bladder

and swallowing all the pills, and the towns I’m passing now

can I try not to see them, the children squatting

by the ditches, the holes in their chests and foreheads,

the woman cradling her tumor, the dog dragging its crippled hips?

I can close my eyes and sit back if I want to,

I can lean against my friends’ shoulders

and eat as they’re eating, and drink from the bottle

being passed back and forth; I can lighten up, can’t I,

Christ, can’t I? There is another subject, in a minute

I’ll think of it. I will. And if you know it, help me.

Help me. Remind me why I’m here.

Scary Movies

SCARY MOVIES

Today the cloud shapes are terrifying,

and I keep expecting some enormous

black-and-white B-movie Cyclops

to appear at the edge of the horizon,

to come striding over the ocean

and drag me from my kitchen

to the deep cave that flickered

into my young brain one Saturday

at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless

between my older brothers, pumped up

on candy and horror—that cave,

the litter of human bones

gnawed on and flung toward the entrance,

I can smell their stench as clearly

as the bacon fat from breakfast. This

is how it feels to lose it—

not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is

that helps you get up in the morning

and actually leave the house

on those days when it seems like death

in his brown uniform

is cruising his panel truck

of packages through your neighborhood.

I think of a friend’s voice

on her answering machine—

Hi, I’m not here—

the morning of her funeral,

the calls filling up the tape

and the mail still arriving,

and I feel as afraid as I was

after all those vampire movies

when I’d come home and lie awake

all night, rigid in my bed,

unable to get up

even to pee because the undead

were waiting underneath it;

if I so much as stuck a bare

foot out there in the unprotected air

they’d grab me by the ankle and pull me

under. And my parents said there was

nothing there, when I was older

I would know better, and now

they’re dead, and I’m older,