Found in Willow Springs 68
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Dog
I'm hiding from the stars tonight. I've pulled
every blind and turned off
all the lights but one, which I've named after you,
which I can see flooding the dark
hallway of my high school when I open the locker
with your name on it, the only one
left, the universe flashing out
onto the floor. I thought maybe I would find
a note from you
and that's why I dreamt about it. In all the pictures
I've seen of my older brother
he is never wearing a tuxedo. But I have one, bent at the edges,
of me and my twin on a boat, on prom night, happy,
already a little drunk. I carry this picture wherever I fly
so I can look at it right before the crash, below the screams
and the smell of urine, I can look into his eyes
and know who I am. All night I've been worrying
about money and cancer and the tooth
I have to get pulled out before it poisons me. I can smell
the lemon I cut earlier for the carrots and fish. I don't know
what to do with myself. I've written the word Freedom
on a piece of paper and taped it to a knife. Then I peeled it off
and taped it to a book of Myakovsky
poems. Finally I took it and stuck it on the screen
of my computer where there is a picture of Erika wearing the silver
necklace I bought her. Outside a dog is sitting in the yard
looking up a the porch. Every once in a while
it wags its tail and whines, then it's quiet, and then it begins to growl.
Halcion
You are the illuminated world, floating ballroom, spark and flash,
cold December star above the hospital,
moonlit pond, little boat, your waters calm
as a spoon. I've never been higher.
I can feel you melt on my tongue like a naked girl wearing a diamond
crown, standing barefoot on a bed
of ice, her eyes turning white, her body a cloud broken by lightning,
glowing like a nurse in a dark hall. You turn
all my emergencies into cotton, all my fainting into land, my blue boy
at the bottom of a paper cup, you make the meadow
bright, make me brave. Now I can walk
through the land of strangers and freeways, surgery and rubber gloves,
the panic, the knife, the ambulance of dawn,
the gurney being lifted into the air. When I'm made you lie down
on the metal bed, when the first tube is threaded into me, I want you
my cherry blossom season, my dream of gauze and light, your petals swirling
around my feet, IVs and Jell-O, Tu Fu singing at the edge of the Yangtze forever.