Stand of Cut-off Tress

 

Always, I was smelling things. I had not idea how to behave. My

teeth were dull. Some days I woke up unaccountably happy.

 

For a time, I began to gather things to give to next of kin. For a

time, I thought I’d wear the antique lace myself.

 

I managed to move through houses without damaging the furniture.

 

People sometimes thought of me as quiet. I don’t know what other

kinds of sounds I would have made.

 

Tell me how I could have pretended to be another species.

 

The sound of the plane is our bodies.

I had never heard it before

 

Always Another Tonight

 

Slow, blind, open—drifting sticks, sugar, hands—and even a kind

of drowning is a mystery to the body, a train slipping into soot.

After a decade of cash and ashes, far from the nostalgic dead—

fingers slipping, the raw pillar, legs, the final harsh, abandoned

whinny—a kind of proof, right here: not past, not lost, not ghost.

Here, in this very pew, time is dust, is broken. The old night is

grass. Turn your head. Look at me. Let us not be “the figures.”