Learning to Interpret Signs and Dreams, and: The Red Single, and: Wet Drape, and: Apple Family, and: Pink and Yellow Hollyhocks, and: Morning Alone in the House, and: Small Boys, Three and Four

Learning to Interpret Signs and Dreams

Once upon a time, you must believe everything has meaning    and that the geese in the dovecote will lay oranges and lemons        in the straw like a balefire's first bright embers.

It's the only way to smoke out the unnamed saints who can help    you,    whose stricken cities burned like their bones. Your Zippo        didn't work, not with faucets of gasoline,

and the geese knew it wouldn't; hissed at you when you tried.    In spring, you must gather camphor and sage for their nests        to show them you'll wait and are contrite.

Suddenly, you must put on gloves, for you don't have the nerves    or dexterity to touch immaculate things. Climb        the white sycamore and wait

for a curl of smoke to unwind like crepe from the dovecote's    beams    and rise to meet you, but remember—if you grab        at what's there, you'll come home

with a fistful of nothing. Reach for the empty spaces in the lattice,    the indigo air, unburning, and you'll meet the upturned face        of your intercessor: a sparrow

quivering in your hand, whose breast is the color of burnt ivory—    a memento of her previous life. Now, she lives        on lupine seeds and has learned to peck

her augured stories into Braille. If you slip a leaf of paper    into the reliquary where she sleeps, she will stay up all night,         hammering out the future.

Before dawn, the white sycamore leaves tremble as she passes,    invisible. You wake and she's gone; the end of the story        coming before your fingers learned to read.

The Red Singlefifteen

In winter that year, I was a dog choking on the end of its chainand no one would hit me with a reason to unleash. I wanted nothingmore than a good dustup—to lace a punch across someone's faceand lift my rage to the surface like a bruise, dark and flashing,the wet-blood gleam of an honest-to-god shiner. For months,I did not sleep. I sat up nights and chewed at my fingernailstill they bled on the sheets, waiting for what wouldn't come,feeling the unmuzzled dog in my skin tearing at things with its      jaws.

Relief came in late spring, not in a fight, but on the boathouse dockwhere rowing arrived like a battered miracle, reeking of sweatand mud. The coach narrowed his eyes on me and said you look ready    to box;he taught me to row in a single scull that fit like a ruby slipper, a redshell-and-oars contraption for which I had always been the missing    gearand the ragged breath of someone to beat up rang in my ears.

Wet Drape

Like searchlights. Slides fanning through a lecture hall,chisels and salt-white sun striking ancient Greece:

kouros, Lapith, Lapith, caryatid.

Knee hard between my knees. Hand at my throat.

In the dark, a temple balanced on my head like a water jug,my contraposto hips are swathed in a wet sheen of linen.

Seventeen, we wedged into the curtained photo boothsof every late night suburban mall. Inside, I was nerveshot marble

and the camera clicked over me, your handscarving away my t-shirt.

Listen to the pianist beneath the piano's noise—the soundof flesh striking ivory, percussion before the tone.

I emerged through those curtained booths like a diver surfacing, wetgleam of polish, body freed from the block,

Pieta aching for the pickaxe. Christ, Bound Slave, David—you knock against me in the dark, hands a soft garrote.

Oh, sculptor, hit me hard and let every unnecessary thing fall away!

Apple FamilyGeorgia O'Keeffe, c. 1920

Clean linen and the apples pierced to pomanders,the window-lights' reddish halos like the soft darknessinside bodies, behind eyelids—

all the white...