Diagonal lines are going somewhere—
teeter like they’re about to
                                    fall

The curvature of the field
is incomplete    an opening   or exit

Page after page of black
white gray      and then

a flash of yellow      As I slip
into sleep I recognize its pattern

dipping in and out of air     —goldfinch

Already irises on the alley’s north edge
Maybe you had to wait for spring
To start missing this place
No future in a brown, barren world

Maybe you had to wait for spring
But you can’t miss the place you’re in
No future in a brown, barren world
Today’s T-minus three months

But you can’t miss the place you’re in
Rent check mailed, potluck later
Today’s T-minus three months
Scrub the rugs, open the windows

Rent check mailed, potluck later
Dilated today, bright greens and blues
Scrub the rugs, open the windows
Obeying some kind of silent orders

Dilated today, bright greens and blues
This week the leaves came all at once
Obeying some kind of silent orders
The French doors of their knowing

This week the leaves came all at once
When did you open to the invisible?
The French doors of your knowing
Light rose & sandalwood incense

When did you open to the invisible
To start missing this place
Light rose & sandalwood incense
Already irises on the alley’s north edge

We drove into the sun
A few trees flowered

You put some music on
& I hummed a little

Innumerable bridges later
We spoke at the same time

saying the same thing
then both said nevermind

talking to myself
We stopped at the record store

but the thing you wanted
had just sold out

No hurry at all
to drive into the sun

as a few trees flower

Sure it’d hurt    Eventually he’d be making dinner    For someone else    Some people are unlucky

They stay alone    Their entire life    Not him he’d fumble or drift into someone’s else’s life 

He was predictable     Is that      What made him less desirable?      She held his hand

She’d leave him A note       Slip out       In the morning         Before sun appeared

Last visible stars        dull and hard          It was enough       Light jacket     Half zipped 

Visions of subways    Busy city intersections        An idea of dinner      A quiet café  

Seat for one        Another life    She would         Have another life  

My sister’s apartment was being renovated: a massive ramp jutted out from the side of the building, bricks and debris sliding down. She said we could walk under the ramp to get inside, and I was wary but went along.

Looks like it might’ve been a tornado after all, so it’s good we got out of bed and took the cats in their carriers to the basement just before midnight. You show me on the map where you sprinted down the hill on your bike a few hours before winds hit the same spot. You’re gung-ho about vacuuming; it’s your day off and my comment that we live in filth made an impression. I always think of Bernadette to Lee Ann (“And she says she does not clean anymore—it just makes things more cluttered”), then feel free to stop caring.

Sunny neighborhood walk, air cool and fresh. Picking up tree branches in my path, some over an inch thick, and tossing them onto what they call the right-of-way in this town (one of my favorite Wikipedia pages lists all the names). Texts from my sisters about an averted shooting in New Orleans (sister from ramp dream is there for the weekend; poets were there for the festival last weekend). I see you’ve put our futon frame on the curb.

Reiki I on Zoom for three hours, then an hour break. Cucumber-cheddar-Triscuits-mustard snack you invented. 45 minutes left, exactly enough time to walk over the river and back. The magnolia has lost its blossoms; a moment later on the ground, a stray pink petal like a wink. Geese jab beaks in muddy riverbank. Red-winged blackbirds shriller than any woman unfairly maligned. Crossing the spearmint bridge, hello quarter moon against pure blue sky. Dollar bill flutters in the grass and I pluck it. At the mailbox, name and social security number has been exposed again.

I receive the attunements. Afterward, lying on my back with hands in position, unexpected transmission that boils down to: My guides were down the street from my childhood home all along. Surprise-cry a little. The teacher said something like this might happen, but I didn’t think it would happen to me. After class, dazed for a while, then wander into the kitchen. You’ve made a perfect salad (secret ingredient: thoroughly rinsed red onion in vinaigrette) and a garlicky flatbread that’s weird and wet but we’d still eat it again.

Dishes, cat-treat rituals. Write poem from journal, notes app, and memory while sitting on the back deck until 8:30 when it’s too dark to see, then move here to the couch.

*

Six parts of the day borrowed from Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day: Dreams, Morning, Noontime, Afternoon, Evening, Night.

Green-hued blue
Red-hued blue
Primary blue
Blue rain in 
a blue mood under
a rankled blue moon

What I wouldn’t give
to give it over
to somebody else    the long
tail game of wait & see
aches with misspent vigilance
& never pays out

I’ve got nothing
up my frilly poet sleeve
No ochre tokens to cash
No dogeared cards in naphthol red
Just a printed map
with a few things circled

Where you wanna go

Where you been

Where you know who you are

In twenty years His hair would be thinning   In thirty years Skin starting to sag on the bone   

He’d still be Shelving books    Dreaming aloud     Half in this world   half in his head   

She didn’t hate him       She’d never hate him    But     The pond    He wanted to go

See the pond     It had a little island     Full of lilies   Then he’d start rambling 

About the painted turtles     the false map turtles      Always the goddamn turtles   

No     she wouldn’t       let anger seep in         He liked turtles       So what?   It already felt distant

An imagined life     About to begin       The turtles         sunning on the rocks 

Season after season        of blooming lilies       She’d seen it before    She wouldn’t see it again  

Sums     Equations      Addition        Subtraction     Division        Multiplication

How a life can be reduced to math   No, she wouldn’t pity him  

I planted two soft potatoes in the back yard
just to see what might happen.

I clawed out nails from the top of the trim,
used them to hang gifted Grapefruit prints
next to the bathroom door.

Then a night fragment dangled:

standing on my aunt’s couch, taking down a red tapestry
because it was too much—
her walls were stuffed with paintings already.

The move is a season away
but the moon eggs me onward, waxing again, coolly
suggesting I toss up a few more things.

Why disobey my dream? Why blithely plant a flag
of denial, then hammer it into the earth
for good measure?

I even think there’s time to make a new friend,
which is either a sign of guru-grade mindfulness

or a train that doesn’t quite make it over a hill
and slides back down the rails,

a child shimmering in the vanishing point
of a gravel alley, chasing a ball,

a face squinting at the sunset while dandelions
and violets bloom on the far side of the skull.

A teacher once told me the body’s back side
holds grief. There’s so much you’ll never see

without a mirror: pointy scapula, twisting spine.

And life will go on and on no matter which way you face
or how you contort.

Can I choose, or will I always follow the signs?

Now, every time I head to the bathroom
Yoko is there to remind me:

Listen to the sound of the earth turning.

Listen to a heart beat.

Choose strife & chew well
The shards are not so tender

The tv cuts itself off
The lights upstairs cut themselves off

The kitchen is dark
I’m just dimming a little 

& from the other room
the internet glows—

It’s 10 p.m. Do you know
where your poems are?

Paint dries at different 
speeds, a fact & annoyances

& from the other room
the internet glows—

Did you mean blood books?
Did you mean blood books?

Sure

How to write when completely distracted, burned out, the figure of time

as a perpetually lovestruck asshole who is largely unwilling to get shit

done yet carries on anyway, like the good time they are, begrimed with

experience and wonder that just won’t quit. I get it, you’re not wondering

how to approach the situation so much as wishing the situation didn’t exist.

I’m glad for existence, though, enough to feel like regret is still worth it,

still worth the weird energy that sparks between humans. I missed you,

friend, and panicked a little when I saw you again, something unearthed

from whichever part of my body stores lust and ambiguity, the part of

my soul that hovers just above myself and wonders what the hell I’m doing.

I missed you, too, city, in your springtime lushnesses and hive-causing pollen

wafting from the branches above, a dove cooing on my windowsill. I pitch

woo easily, especially while sneezing in spring, tits up, shoulders back as I 

walk into the gallery, office, studio, bar to meet my friends, my beloveds,

all in my feelings, the day stacked with time (that asshole), as I stand by

hoping you’ll message me something witty instead of something polite

or something about what groceries we need, what becomes of us when we

work and parent only. But my desires are all mixed up. Exactly mixed up

in the right way. Every month I wonder what this month is. So what is April?

Just when we think we know the time it changes. They change, and whatever

wooing strategy long since messed up for good by what I’ve been told is an

intimidating enthusiasm. That you should be so lucky to have this poet’s 

attention, and this poem’s attention, too. All the better to woo you with, syntax

undone and reformulated into something more interesting than our texts, eros is

waiting and they are both impatient but in it for the long game. When I’m 60,

70, 80, 90–you just wait, eros. I mean don’t wait. But also, wait! I do not miss

the particular way I was lost in my youth, but I do miss the way I could conduct

a campaign of soft attention or enter into a minor flirtation. I promise you,

I am a sincere man, woman, whatever. There are no palm trees where I come

from, and I am from no where, or else from an obscure province, one you’ve

been to on summer vacation if you’re kind of artsy. I become undone, thinking

of you. No seriously. The one you choose is not always the one you love, but I 

don’t have that problem. I always choose the one I love for my sweet attention

and major flirtations and unexpected trajectories of encounter, even though 

encounters are rarely unexpected and usually overdetermined. I compose with

divided intention. The grasses on our lawn grow at uneven rates and I love

unevenly and widely. Don’t keep this between us. Instead, let it be in the world.

Let it be with the ghosts of all our past loves and loves, appropriate and inappropriate,

and I won’t tell you which is which. Swirled terrible coffee and and tilted responses 

to come ons. I’m doing my face with misaligned theory–lots of lust and pink,

I put my love in the poem, pitch woo to the poem, make my vows to the poem.

Where’s the bar and where are you? Where’s the conference and where are you?

What sonic aesthetics do you need for me to prove my devotion? Who is time

in your mythology? How do you align with the universe? Listen to me, listen to me.

There were zinnias lining the garden entrance    Common flowers   The eye forgets To track   A path

that led to so many shades      of dahlias The bench   Was it on the bench?     They sat on the bench

It was a weekday      Garden mostly empty         There was     Sun and still more sun    

Squirrels playing games    With each other              fat-breasted Robins

Hopping here and there      Fingers hoping   Fingers touching     then pulled away      back stiffens  

Something    in the air shifts   Maybe      She already knew      He kept talking about leaving  

There was a time When they both    would dream aloud    But now     She kept her words 

to herself     She was leaving       without him   Would she tell him