Because personal poetry is no longer
the dominant mode unless, of course,
you are an Other or can tolerate the overkill
of Persephone spitting out her seed,
I'll be impersonal as dust, the lord
protector of less, as self-indulgent as an egg.

Let's blame it on the brain:
I was going to stay asleep until
I could stand music. Smudge of a day through lace,
nothing moves when we lose delight.
I'd been studying inner forms.

Luckily, while I was voodooed numb
and the sun's yolk hardened
over our home, I hadn't made many promises
I couldn't keep. — People die in bed, —
my mother always said, nozzling her Electrolux
through the pink sack of our sleep.

Forget the cruelty
of April, February had fangs,
incisors of mini-daffs and Daphne,
when you pulled me out of bed
to the pale new park
on the other side of the river,
a reclaimed wetland as subtle
as a roll of paper towels.

Who could trust this cicatrix
of post-industrial land planted
with too many little trees trussed
to poles flapping warning sings:
Do not, do not, do notâ?¦
I felt slippery, a chalaza in a cup
and held tightly to the double helix of us.

Off the paved path (made from
ground up sneakers) we spotted
a boy dragging a heap of goose
by its fanned-out wing, the neck flopping
like a question mark. His free hand
struck at a small woman pulling him, who was,
in life, his mother. She had a face
like a mink and was screaming about disease,
The boy yelled to us, — This one's already dead! —
and held the goose like a bagpipe.

What will suffice is pleasure,
every golden egg. Pain fits less
into ellipses. Again, I apologize
for the three pound storm
that is my brain and me.











From Poetry Magazine, Vol. 186, no. 3, June 2005. Used with permission.