You promise you will never leave me.
All day I have been trying to locate grief
And all day you have been trying to convince me
Grief and pain are the same.
If grief leaves me I will know
I have lost something vital to happiness.
So keep your promise and leave
The one I love. I’ll keep you here on call
Like a substitute teacher outside
An empty room you’ll never see.
I have to learn quiet again,
I told the yellow grass
By the library’s stone wall.
The sun shimmered,
Not understanding. November
Shrugged and disrobed.
Eyes closed against the wind, holding a deep breath
Until it warms, I still hear the midsummer breeze
The temperature dropped thirty degrees
Between cups of coffee.
I dreamed my daughters were snowboarding away
Into the future. Then I was made of snow
And they had made me.
The pen you
Gave ran out
Of ink and I
ran out of words
The curve of its light on your thigh’s a river,
My heartbeat a cragged peak
And valley path it’s carved
Through fifteen hundred weeks
I slept but did not dream.
I woke with eyes of sand.
I smelled the knives of fear.
I held one in my hand.
The week could not be said.
The words taut in their bows.
I slept but did not dream.
The fly is on the rose.
The frost is on the wheels.
The visors are pulled down.
The streets are on their knees
The rainbow’s on the ground.
The thumbtack of the sky’s
Not blue as it once seemed.
A blur that once went by.
I’ll sleep but will not dream.
My right hand is already sleeping in a dream of your hand
I look the final hour through today’s glasses
So I can focus on the details waving like grass in a wind
Of glass, the wind’s larger motion a single word
(yet the wind wants to join my hand in a dream of form
The shape of our bodies weaving a word that won’t
Come back to me) the day turns like your back
(it may never come back) and the new day wanders
In like a cat out of the dark which always means yes
As if hunger were affirmation and not direction
Even this self-imposed silence rings
A thought let go finding its way to music
Leaves falling through leaves standing on stem
Breath of bells before the world was listening
We know what the year’s worth
Like we know a coin from its size in our palm.
The month’s full moon. A gumball in a gumball machine.
And once in awhile, two slip out at once
Into your hands. When did the fall’s first
Cold night become a harbinger for a life
Shifting seasons? I look out there:
Not a leaf has left me. Still, if what’s ahead
Is more than loose change, you’re going
To have to get a lot closer to keep
Us both warm with what’s coming.
Translations from the English 