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80 There’s my ashen girl in the stands with a scarf over her soft to steel-wool head. She’s there like some buoy next to a friend she calls sister, who has been riding a separate current now for years. It has been too much for too long and we know it is time to take hold of the lightning and let it kill her, or fill her—doctor or angel or nurse— like some new balloon and set her glancing across the rooftops with her dancing slippers. She’ll sprinkle a little sand over each roof and soft-shoe it for the sleepers. I can’t hide the hawks. I can’t hide the crows under my tongue and tell my lass so kneeling beside her in the bathroom. Can I learn to love the ashes of this world, turn my palms to the sky like the first snow is sifting down? Can I catch my love on my tongue after she is gone, close my eyes while my own wife melts into me? We’re on a possible farewell tour visiting old friends when she tilts her face my way from the stands. We make in one look a hammock of our blood and I pool where she pools, drink from that well of loneliness in her I can’t quite loop my arms around. Why Everything Is a Poem john rybicki three poems by 81 Then we turn again to where our son skates gladiatorial with his long hair fluttering from beneath his hockey helmet. That boy who once swam across my belly reaching to pinch my bristly chin hairs. I sing to keep the embers in the night sky alive— those sparks God tows out of my love’s chest each night. I sing from the crown of her stubbled head to the arch of her foot where I’d kiss and kiss her till she said, Dude, rub in the love like you do. I sing her dripping just out of the bathtub, her finger squeaking against the steam on the bathroom window where she’s scrawling her last love note to us. She’s singing the words over and over as she writes, I love my boys, leaning hard on the o in love. She leaves a heart and words that reappear when we place our mouths close to the glass. My son and I fog it with our breath after she is gone. 82 ecotone There’s a river of light inside my lass and I’m hauling it out of her veins like rope. Even if she’s in the dirt. I saw my love’s shadow with a strawberry heart pinned to its chest; needles there too drilling at her brown eyes. I saw meteorites banging their fists into the ground around her grave. I saw my wife warm her blood engine and rise from the earth shaking off the dirt crumbs so she could come home to me. I Saw a Whiskey Bottle Turn into a Drop of Rain 83 john rybicki I’m Only Sleeping Another six-pack in the tub floating downstream next to my bed. I fall asleep with the light on and a beer in hand. It tips over so I wake up in what feels like my own piss. My Jack Russell Sparky’s drowsing two feet higher at the foot of the bed with all those clothes heaped up, layered over Julie’s hospital things: her bathrobe and diapers and soft bottoms; lotion for rubbing her face and bald head. Let go now, Johnny. The moon is writing sweeter sentences on the water than you anyway. Pull the earth over you now and sleep. ...

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