last time I wrote you an engagement poem
a celebration of the possible
I might as well have sung a ballad
while I shoved you down the stairs
or emblazoned your photograph
Continue reading… "Letter to M. on the Occasion of Her Second Engagement"There are one thousand people
in the Kozzy mall tonight.
They are buying beer, notebooks,
parsnips, tablecloths, underwear,
vacuum cleaners, barstools,
wait for large-mouth bass in elm-shade.
Having announced their presence
in the Big Bride Baptist Church today,
and sung, they reach into their coolers
with tender hands and bring up cans
Camera safely beside me,
I sit with my guide in a small café
at the top of the world,
on the barren Tibetan Plateau
nestled among mountain peaks,
A common hairpin appears on my bathroom
tile floor. I bend to pick it up.
So out of season. She went away early fall.
It was a recurring dream.
Oedipal, said Freud.
Impossible, said God. I have neither father nor mother.
God called for Jung.
What did Freud say, asked Carl.
“The Russian woman’s daughter is sweeping the floor,” you announce, hauling yourself out of chemo’s last slime before slipping back down into undertow. In dreams you are forever traveling—driving near cliff’s edge, navigating bus stops, running to catch a plane. Perhaps you’re at a wedding in the Old Country, where our dead have gathered
Continue reading… "The Russian Woman"You’re a cellist with older hands
and when you hit the harmonic near the bridge
you tremble
Boston, being an economical city,
and Cambridge, being nearby, like to put
their bridges to multi-purposes, especially
when space is tight, as it tends to be wherever
a bridge is needed, given the wiles of rivers:
I wondered why so many empty parking spaces
Then looked up and saw the lid of the sky had been removed,
Thousands of bodies gushing upwards
