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Dear Federico

It’s late. I’ve stood for hours
watching swallows strike
and swivel at the insects’
commas. The certain
circling they commit to
feed themselves. We first
acknowledged one another
on the bridge above their frenzy,
in the growing dark. We tethered
together, all pause and follow,
while streetlights burst
amber over tulip poplars
that guide the river’s dark cord.

On the empty steps of my apartment,
you offer me a cigarette, and I take it
simply to touch your hand,
even though I haven’t smoked
in years. Federico, I don’t understand
your poems with their silverlipped
volcanoes and your
obsession with the dangers
of the moon: all salted, all boot
crushed, all clovered in mold.

As if I dreamt the careful linen
of your shirt, the undoing of the black
slick of your hair in the concrete’s shy
heat. I was afraid you’d mistake
my hesitation for the bleeding of juniper
into the air, the long tongue of the sky
refusing, a zipper’s seam split open.

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Divination

The long body of the Buick
is brown like a doe. The open
hood reveals inscrutable

innards of iron. Steam
rises from the cavity, the open
stomach of a deer on a hard

November field. Both
Buick and doe can carry
a man through winter.

My father reaches into
that space, his back
bent with effort as if

through haruspicy he will
solve the mystery of what
doesn’t work. I can’t tell

him where gears go
wrong, but I know
what stopped the doe.

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Prelude

The restless build of song:
my own too-young-

to-drive, too-far-from-city
self broke out in pacing

while parents monitored
my every switched direction.

I grew brusqueful, breathless threw
myself down on couches and beds

trying to break apart the monotony
of my body—got back up to pace,

to swim in the slow circle
of adolescence. In some car

in a city out of reach, there—
someone was up to everything.

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Night Shifts

               to the memory of Alfred Petrovich

How good the green air felt
when I broke from the foundry’s door
leaving behind the vulcan light
we pounded thin for thirteen hours

until it turned more delicate
than wire, became a tracery of orange
against the skin. How the hammer
echoed in the ear and fettered me

to sleep. How loud the body’s metronome.
Below the tic of cooled muscle, eyes
dim in their sockets, the web
of breath remains. The headlamp mind,

released from the body’s tether, drifts toward
soft-edged trees. How similar the road at waking
to the one bound for rest. How the hammer
of the heart swings, as if for hours, in hand.

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Kingdom

If desire fell from the tree
of knowledge then let me build

a kingdom of apples. The kingdom
will be like this:

ten young men crowned in lilacs,
ten young men reclining on cedar boughs,

ten young men moving like night rain
among saguaros.

Forget the parable
about the five wise virgins who prepared

for the bridegroom’s arrival, they will keep
their oil. This kingdom

is built from the generosity of a kingfisher’s
breast, the thallus of lichen, three agates in the hand

of a boy who’s rowed to shore. In this kingdom there is
no how-to-be-desired, no treasure

to be found in a field, because it shall not be
hidden from you. No, it is

on the lips of every lighted face that seeks
to kiss you welcome.

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Excerpt from “Which Truth, Patricia?”

            Nathan’s driving but it feels like falling, and in the fading day he sees nothing but the road, not the wooded hills or cornfields or farms or the nice new houses on the outskirts of town or the shabby houses at town’s edge, and even the road he barely sees, having driven it so many times years ago, the road between his small college town and her bigger small town, between his house and her smaller house, and as he approaches her Nixon-era ranch on a street of like ranches, he seems to float, a parachute spreading as he drifts to ground. Dead leaves, the same sapphire-gray as everything in the dimming light, layer the yard. The big oak. Shrubs. Decorative brick. His mother suddenly dead; his sudden trip home; his father telling the story—“I came home and . . . ” —again and again; the excess of flowers and well-meaning people; the ludicrous God-talk from church-going locals; the absurd comforts from professors who believed nothing; the brand-new holiness of his mother’s piles of crap; the siege of all the ways he’d been a bad son: all leading here, always here, to Angie’s door.

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            He’s here. She can feel it. That opening in her throat; that perfect awareness of her mouth. Consumed by the need to consume. Keep washing. Bubbles sparkle. Sponge whispers against plate. When you wash dishes, wash dishes, Buddhists say.

            He’s here!

            Her sponsor said not to go to the service and she didn’t. Because she’s learned to be good and careful. Every fucking minute of the day. Plus, how much better that he came to her? Some part of her knew he would. The same part that’s been waiting six years for this, the same part that always wants a drink. Then again, she doesn’t really know he’s here. It could be—is probably—her wishful addict’s thinking. She should open the door and check. But her mother. Her daughter. Wash the dishes. Bubbles. Plate.

            All those years, her mother had trusted her because it was less work to trust her and her mother already worked so hard. Before Nathan, Angie had stayed out of trouble, kept up in school. With boys, just kisses, not sex. If she ever fell in love, she’d thought, she would have so much sex. Sex was the opposite of being abandoned. Had her parents stopped having sex? Is that why her dad left? Her mother blamed the booze. It was easier than blaming herself. In that picture Angie had kept under her bed, her dad wore old jeans and a brown plaid shirt, a farm-boy cap, his feet a good yard apart, making a mountain out of his skinny self. His eyes are shadowed, his grin, huge. As if the grin itself is a joke. On the person behind the camera: her mom. On the viewer: her.

            Now she’s an adult, so to speak; her mother doesn’t trust her anymore and she’s glad. Maybe if her mother had been a different so of person, lazy, happy, unpragmatically less trusting, maybe if her mother had been the opposite of herself then she, Angie, would be the opposite of herself. Would be better.

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Excerpt from “This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love.”

It was the time of day when the sky starts to lose color and the city hasn’t lit up yet and people leaving work spill into the streets. I walked in a haze of exhaust and cheap food smells past the screamers and winos and prostitutes on East Colfax. I’d lived here for four years, my longest time in one place since leaving my small Ohio hometown. Before moving to Denver, I hopped along the Front Range, trying to follow a map for salvation: a new school here, a new boyfriend or job there. But it always ended in failure and new or increased meds. Denver was different. I kept my life simple and aimed low. Walking along Colfax, my heart still raced. And not just from fear. I felt like a kid at a fair. Maybe the games cost too much and the rides scared me. But still, a fair! I could step onto a side street and buy crystal meth. I could find strangers to pay me for sex. Everywhere, chances to ruin my life. And so everywhere, chances not to. In other words, as my dad perpetually reminded my mom, it could always be worse.

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I’d been avoiding men until the mythical era when I would be capable of having a healthy relationship. But Rick raised my hopes. Each week, we watched Animal Psychic from the scuffed Goodwill loveseat I used when I closed my Murphy bed for guests. Pitched forward and cupping his chin, he examined the screen; soon I’d find myself pitched forward and cupping my chin too, as if Evelyn had led us in a peculiar yoga pose. Sometimes he’d turn to me and say something like, “Why doesn’t the tiger ever say, ‘Get me the fuck out of this cage’? They always just want more variety in their diet or someone to sing to them.”

            I’d laugh. “I’d ask for a chunk of my captor’s flesh. Do you think Evelyn censors them?”

            “She’s got to. But,” he’d add in a mock reverent voice, “Evelyn’s censorship is never evil and always wise.”

            Our visits started lasting longer than the show. He told me stories from his using days, which he conveyed with a mixture of wonder and shame. “People think you’ve gone wild. But I didn’t feel wild. I felt more focused than ever. I always knew what I wanted and my whole being worked to get it. It was like serving a God that actually did something: it made you feel really good, and if you forsook it, it whipped your sorry ass. I was the best fucking liar. You should have seen me. My ex got clean before I did, when she got pregnant. I pretended to get clean too. But it wasn’t even pretending. It was a total, sincere effort to do what I had to do to keep using. She made me take this home drug test and I was genuinely appalled by her distrust. When the results came back positive, I was genuinely appalled by that. Look how everything, even science, was against me, trying to take what I cared about most. Would you believe that I actually convinced my ex, a former junkie herself, that the test results were false? I did research, I made arguments, I found expert witnesses, I looked deep into her eyes, the whole bit. All that trouble, and then she catches me in the bathroom midday because I wanted my fix too much to wait.”

            I loved watching him speak at length: he became a flurry of motion, his hands leaping around, his face acrobatic. But sometimes he’d say something like “between you and I,” and my dad’s voice would break in: “You think you sound smart, but you don’t,” words he often lobbed at some local newscaster on TV. And in my head, I’d argue, “Don’t be so superficial. He is smart. And look how he loves his son.”

            Rick often talked about Reggie, who loved Arnold Lobel books and wouldn’t eat broken food. “At least that’s how it was the last time I saw him,” he said. “These things change. You wouldn’t believe how fast.”

            “I would,” I said.

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