Winter Picnics

Janie I remember
that winter
when you padded deliberately
through the library in your black tights,
one set of toes exposed,
like you had learned to live there
in the spirit of an unending pajama party,
a sober, academic orgy.
I watched your feet feel the floor
and asked you to meet me at my
electric kettle, all the way
back in the stacks, in that magic fairy
forest where monstrous minds might
lurk behind every dusty, gilded tome.
Those rows humbled us,
silent and sublime,
overwhelming us with the sheer volume
of their volumes of thought and
unthought, alike published, left unsorted.
Janie, do you remember how
I wore my facial hair ironically?
How my mustache was named
'The Admiral' and was widely admired,
giving even critics an impression
of financial stability?
You said when I touched you that my
hands were awfully soft,
awfully soft for someone who passed
at a glance for a lumberjack.
And my pale fingers left your pale body
full of awe. Full of awe.
I tell you I can never forget that winter
of indoor picnics, windowless
basement cafes across campus where I would meet you
with a bag of glass containers.
We chopsticked grated carrots in ginger sauce
from the same bowl
and spread from a slab of brie
onto crispy cookies.
Janie, lately I've begun to doubt the veracity
of the lament that
you live life forward but understand it in reverse.
For I have suspected now that with our parents
as children we did understand all of life
and that what is gained in the living
is just living, as we watch ourselves become
what we understood from the start.

Drops and Doses

Drops and doses

must be taken twice daily.

You will feel spoonfuls of illness

and spoonfuls of cure,

unsure which is wise and what is ailing.

Should you conquer the world,

should you save it or change it,

may you feel in your gut

the ebullience of medicine,

of fantastic projects thought up

but unexecuted,

of your hand on the wheel

of a creaking car on a country road,

the flying assurance that life is surely yours

and the even assessment

that it probably is not.

How is it that this can be so fascinating

and yet so difficult to endure?