Everyday has its worries

It stormed and stormed until three car-alarms from barely new Hondas
went off under street lamps more electrical wire.
But I don’t like to think of rain that way.
Not the way I remember it from old movies I’ve seen
where shadows of men in trenches moved quietly along the walls
of a shopping mall. And behind a dumpster someone gasped
and three birds relentlessly nodded over the trash taken out from the food court.
Did you know that deep in the ocean whole countries collapse into themselves?-
that formal and absolutely present abyss. I have heard (and I believe it)
that all things: air, dogs, plastic rulers, can go up
in smoke someday. And I also know that on that day
I will go back into the earth the way ants seemed to do
when I was child, kicking over their incredible houses.
If there had been a way, five years ago, to step right into
Baum’s first illustrations of the Wizard of OZ,
I think I would have done it then.
I would have remembered the names and the addresses
so as to keep in them in an address book in a world, which,
after all, had never even claimed to be still.
I remember the way it felt to leave a Ferris wheel at thirteen:
my feet on the metal bars, toes fat under such
ridiculous sandals. There should have been a law against it—
cigarettes and cheap liquor stolen from your older brother.
When I left the house at eighteen, I left a bottle of shampoo in the gutter.
And sometimes, if I am not trying hard enough not to,
I see that whole house boiling over into sud and bubbles
—that kind of mist, like the color purple takes on air and water.
Remember Glinda (the good witch)
the way she seemed to move at the top of the screen like a moth with a wand for a star.
And the thing is I never cared much for the way two handfuls of dry sand
on the beach at night could slip right between my fingers
so lightly that I never even noticed until there wasn’t anything left.
I never cared for that kind of-oh, what is it? - accumulation.
Like snow on top of more snow until the car is stuck
and you can’t find the shovel so you sit inside all day and wonder if
the hot chocolate had always been warmer when you put the cream in it.

Ars Poetica

I have inner resources. I know this because photographs
of people from the 19TH century in front of houses that I recognize
amuse me.

Life, my friends, as Berryman would said, is boring.
Well I have thought about it and it certainly is.
Sometimes I think of him, Aimee’s aunt too,
both of them jumping off bridges and drowning.

I remember, and this is not a lie, one night in high school
watching the moon and thinking of it’s largeness, how it stayed
in the same square of the backseat window which was streaking with more rain
in lines from the kind of wind a car makes in the night during winter.
I remember thinking of getting out of it, into the rain, away from it all.
I was so young then.

Twice now, I have thought there was a purpose in living.
I guess those assumptions weren’t exactly wrong.
God said we are for procreation.

I remember John the other night on A&E Intervention
sitting in the park, smoking cigarettes, missing Hubert
who had been successful and clean for six months.

I thought he would be unhappy
that Hubert’s doctors said he could not
visit the park that he and John had slept in.
But he said between a drag “I’m just glad,
very glad, that he is alive.”

All life is a changing life.
And if they were to meet and Hubert buy a pizza,
what would they even say?
Two different people now.

Watching someone go today, I feel a lot like him.
It reminds me of the last scene in Good Will Hunting when Ben Affleck
tells Matt Damon just go, says some romantic shit about how every morning he knocks
and hopes he won’t be home.

Anne will be move to Jersey in a month.
She will share an apartment and a job with a girl who has already paid
for the elliptical machine to be installed.
And she has brought new clothes from Ann Taylor
and a red jacket that I said tonight really makes her look
like a grown up and she’s happy with this new guy
who looks and sings nothing like the scruffy ones
we imagined when we were girls.

And I am happy now because I have let her go and it is not like it was
five years ago when she first started wearing tank-tops to parties
and I was in the old band t-shirts. And I think I hated her then,
or hated myself-- my resistance to change.

But eventually I started wearing makeup,
being pretty responsible and publicly happy enough to not make people nervous
or mother call for the brothers, or anyone, to just talk.

So, mama, at twenty two I’ll tell you:
Treat me as you do your car in the winter
when the windshield takes a few minutes to defrost.
I’ve always moved a little slower and I’ll be okay
because I never wanted the money, the sex, or even the marriage.

It’s that silly poem I memorized in college composition:
“let me not to the marriage of true minds.”
Since then I have imagined life unfolding in situations beginning always
in me leaving the library and someone else leaving
who might say something about Levis and want to know
me and the first thing I think about in the morning
which is not him
and is instead
poetry.

Times when I know there could be no other way to describe
the way the ocean looks at night then the way Levis does
when he notices the keys on his piano,
their whiteness, his son sleeping
and the realization coming in ripples
and in tides that he will leave him
and he will walk miles
until he finds a drug
and a car and ends up in a classroom
making love to a student who is married
and there are decorations for Easter hung on the windows with scotch tape.
The quiet moments.
All life is empty life.

you've got eyelids like moon balls, baby. let's make out.

joni mitchell both sides now


Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I've looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way
I've looked at clouds from both sides now

From up and down, and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way you feel
As ev'ry fairy tale comes real
I've looked at love that way

But now it's just another show
You leave 'em laughing when you go
And if you care, don't let them know
Don't give yourself away

I've looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It's love's illusions I recall
I really don't know love at all

Tears and fears and feeling proud
To say "I love you" right out loud
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds
I've looked at life that way

But now old friends are acting strange
They shake their heads, they say I've changed
Well something's lost, but something's gained
In living every day

I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all
I've looked at life from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all

is crimson & clover not the most beautiful song I have ever heard
i want to be born allllllllllllll over again

Lopsided lamb's head on the table. Again with the wooled skin
and curved wrist. Tonight, I’ll see you from the yard.
You’ll wait in between the leaves that fall before winter.
Nice--
like that.