Margaret

mostly balled herself up,
mostly dropped by unannounced.
The dinner plans ruined,
she figured it would be easier to just pick up a Milky Way on the walk home.

please

tell me about any books you know about memory.

i accidentally turned in a nypl book into my school's library.

sorry, spicer.

there is a bus moving in the world,
how peculiar that the night keeps on breathing
how we call keep breathing in our sleep
to wake up breathing

recalling a dream from when we were a child.

part I

I borrowed
a memory,
a fraction
the weight of two black
socks.
the winter coat.

three beads of blue
berries on my tongue

&

there were never enough
wild flowers,
never enough
daisies. But,

the unfamiliar maps
an empty stage where players wait
direction
the cobalt blue curtains,

they part
and it all seems
close enough.

traps out on a lawn, set to the hour. a snap. a tepid temperature. a horrible stench. a fish in every hand.

exercise

I'm never sure if I should embrace or escape the narrative, or if either are really possible. I've been nostalgic lately (ha, as of late, as if it ever stops, daily) So I'm working on this. I'm working things. I'm not sure how I feel about the voice here, although it is a hard voice to get away from when I had to work with the Norton Anthology, and also with a voice I used to work with when I studied with this book. It brings it all back. Kalamazoo, with its familiarity and a walk to school, a drive to rocket star, the back porch kale. I loved that apartment, even though we feared the cats getting out.

The Norton Anthology

Your notes in my copy,
ink wells,
the blur of your
scripts. a,a,b,a,b,c.

c,d,d.

die, leave, and feel, adrienne rich
(me) saying things quietly,

through metaphor. My notes

on Dickinson, your blue heart below
Yeats.

The cankerworm was especially damaging to roses,

I don’t even remember,
and we met, apparently

in a Shakespearean Sonnet.

Season. Time. (it stops for no one) When I see all these things
I question yer beauty,

scorn. and virtue. Why the indifferent beak of Zeus,
poor Leda, and someone else before us both
writing notes for Pound and Eliot.

A cursive pencil
up against your arrow and ink pen.
My large changing script.

And
I remember
your big white bed
up against all the walls,
you moved it, so uncomfortable
within them,

and how empty the glasses were left that night,
and how empty they all are now.

buttons

they unravel,

sometimes.