I Talk Myself through the Facts of Each Day, and: Conversation with Lace Thong and Car Keys, and: Conversation with Glass and Joist, and: Fluvial, and: Love Story, and: Elegy at the Strandline

I Talk Myself through the Facts of Each Day

Here is a peachfat in my hand. This meansit must be August.

Here is a child, new fruitand soft, calling me Mama,climbing up into my lap.

I can't see the singingblackbird, but I hearits tin song

so I believeit is near, the way I believe in the pier—that it will holddespite the water's prodigious gray

lull and pull—and the way I believea single word can rescue.

A word like spandrel.

A word like thigh.

This tablewhere I sit all through the slant

amber afternoon—it is a tableI choseagain this morning.

When you said, Sleep,I almost believedI could. Be still.

            [Here, say somethingabout a peach        over-softening, or a child

lengthening, or the verb to climb,    which means to go up         by clinging]

The facts of each day come to restall around me, fallen,rust petals of the ditch, lily.

Conversation with Lace Thong and Car Keys

She is in the kitchen bent overIn a blue lace thong when he comesThrough the door blows by her forgot my keys he says

She says ohShe is standing up now having foundWhat she was looking for she forgets now what it was

Down the hall the thunk of a drawerOpening the broken music of his handsRunning over its contents did you find them

She says yes he says good she says

Blows back through the kitchenThe keys jangle their little found song gotta goHe says bye she says bye

To a door already latched shut she saysTo the ringing quiet I guess I'll get dressed now

It was seam tape she needed no it wasA pair of shears she slides into her jeans then she

Snips the loose thread at the crotch

Conversation with Glass and Joist

From her side of the bed she says tell meThis is years ago now he says what

Do you mean she saysTell me something

WhatAnything

Then the palpable glassOf his silence and her words falling

From it like stunned birds then the sinkingOf a broken dusk down into night

By now the towers have fallenThere is a baby

In the next room nuzzling sleepAnd her body

Has learned the meaning of bothCollapse and endure by now

She is accustomed to being the lastOne up in a house

That settles and shiftsIn the night the sigh and snap

Of a joist slackeningFrom its nail she says

To the glass to the fallingNight did you hear that

Fluvial

All night I hear the river askingto cross me and I say, Fine, cross me.

I can't deny the downstreamwaters inside me, the sediment, or the light

that shreds as the current weaves.So yes, I will wade

out past the shallows,sifted, I will walk

into the rusted bladeof the river, which resists me,

and go essentially nowhere.Let me say it, then,

that I am stone. And have tired.That I have woken

in a glittering, spring-fed coldand called it cold.

See how the river has honed my coarseedges, dragging me along, then

unhanding me to settle in its bed,veined and woven. I am not sorry

to rest here amidthe alluvial, colorful hardnesses.

Love Story

Now you are four in a boat.Cut of heartwood.

Love bears down,a slow storm.

This is in the time of no oars.Past the point

of endless questions, one more story            before bed. Onlychipped songs,                    birds and complaints, lispof wave against gunwale. Love

                    a low rollingprayer of gray         and gray and gray.

This is in the time of finish your homework,hang up your jacket...