Harper Library

You left your blue tutu
and your computer
in the afternoon sunlight
where silence does have a sound,

hums among
chandeliers and paintings
of presidents
and books and books.
Oh, books, books!

Pictured you as my pretty
blue bride, pirouetting
with the netting cast
as bright shadow across your face,

looked across the aisle
and saw this title:
'Heaven: A History'
just next to
'The Decline of Hell.'

Your browser dreamed
of Barcelona.
Let's away to Europe.
Let's study abroad.

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?

Use

By now you are used to the use I used to make of you.
And what you miss most is my tenderest misuse of you.
I miss it too.

How it Felt Last Winter While I Was Creating the Kingdom of Ends

I have ascended into winter,
ancient, clean and bright,
thinking now of summer sounds and of
the memory of our memory and of
that mixed tape of sighs pondered,
the soundtrack of our lives.

When the days grow dim
cold ways sink their grim teeth
into my thoughts.
And remorse is all I can muster
these short days, these latter
latter days.

Milk Down in My Belly

Do you remember how it came?
Like the patter of the rain?
First soft and then insistent?

I'd been practicing till I learned
most every trick used to discern
the dusk hours from the twilight.

I asked myself, I asked and asked
as if my soul were looking glass
and not the one who's looking.

But this strange peace, it laughed and taunted,
distracted me from what I wanted,
put things another way.

Smelling of sandalwood, feeling bourgeois
bringing dignity to ever new horrors
like suicide and sex abuse,

it felt like milk down in my belly.
Cats land lightly, cats land deftly
and I had landed soft.

Oh, would she stay? Oh, would it last?
Of course the course was just a class.
I don't need this forever.

Gently then, I let it go.
The wind, balloons, the melting snow
all love us in their leaving.

If it was God whose breath I felt
who knows our needs and gives us help,
I thank him for this extra.

Guest Versifier

You know who she is.
All the ladies in the house say:
Hey!

Nasty girl nasty girl
God I love my little nasty girl
Heels, skirt, it all works.
'But I'm a Kierkegaardian, a convert'—that's her advert
No, you're just a special kind of pervert
Wanting some life of the mind
But also just wanting to show your behind
On and on and on and just grind
inclined, reclined
it's what she's all about
turn the lights out, so she can get her freak out.
She hasn't even seen the world yet
just a nasty coquette
A nasty brunette, showing off her fishnets
Not her ethics
Fancying herself a nerd
Like some good girl in the world
But a nasty world
Makes for a nasty girl
She needs her B.I.G. biggie
Because she's a nasty piggy