Found in Willow Springs 95
Some sentences, some clauses, a word.
It took a long time to cross the room.
The room was so long.
The room had no ceiling because the house had no roof.
The floor was uneven.
Any round thing set on one side would roll to the other.
There was a collection of roundish objects to the left.
The windows were difficult to discern because there were no walls.
Some of us could hear the dead only just as we started walking or just
before we got there.
Others heard them all the time: singing, carrying on.
Below the floorboards, below the space below the floorboards: relics.
A cache of seeds and plastic.
Snow.
The cast-off, spooned bones.
No longer necessary.
Necessary for such a short time
Interview
After Bhanu Kapil, “Twelve Questions”
The fish, when split, had a belly full of plastic, but it was still a fish.
I sifted up from the bottom with the motor in my ear.
The heron forgot it had legs at all, once it left the lake.
I am always wanting to take things off and leave them in piles to walk away from.
I will do that, to begin.
I will take the pin from the hinge’s middle.
I will bury that in the hole that is for shouting into.
I will live by walking. Also by standing still.
That is too many I’s in a row.
The shape of the body can be felt even if it cannot be seen.
The shape is made by the tracks the walking makes,
as seen from above; as seen from below.
Who is responsible? I leave my mother out of poems; I think I am responsible.
I have been trying to get the sawblade through the green board,
but the green board’s sap and swelling make the saw stick.
I remember sifting up from the bottom with balls of taconite in my pockets,
and the train coming and the train leaving and the wind stirred up from that.
If I say nothing, no one will know where I am.
When I say I want to take things off of me
I mean the knotted net—not the lip, not the limb.
I know I am not a fish.
One morning, it was still dark when I woke on the pine needles.
The barred owls weren’t far away. My family was breathing.
I listened for each of them breathing; I heard each of them breathing.
I practice being bodiless.
I use my body for this exercise.
Lunar Retreat
Every year the moon slips farther away from here:
four centimeters for every three hundred sixty-five days.
The length of an entire newt! Every year.
Don’t go, don’t go:
everyone speaks this from out of our sleep.
We’re never simultaneously awake on earth,
so it’s never not being said.
Do you hear those geese in the dark?
Down here the men are trying to build robots who think
like men think.
Remember the days we were happy
to pump our tanks full of diesel?
I am able to make a limited number of animals from paper
(frog, wolf, crane)
but they can’t even breathe on their own.
The moon is pulling.
That makes the air organize
in an aimed way, like rain.
The poet1
says she knows it’s done
when it stops bothering her.
I’ve come to the bottom and still
I can’t sit still.
