LIVING ON EARTH
Part of the celestial sky known as the sea.
Where there’s little of Earth
and nothing of us as these forms.
In the animal soup of time beside the Water Bearer
and the Great River. They’re up there for the lost
with Polaris. In the oceans. At home.
In your own body which is mostly water
and mostly not yours. Not even tonight
while you’re in it. When another body
sleeps alongside all your want.
What does the moon know of our language,
our care for its perceived loneliness
which may be its one joy.
Where would you find love if not on the earth?
As if we should be permitted elsewhere.
As if we understand our own wars,
our reasons for fleeing, forgetting—
the history we do not allow ourselves to imagine
and the lives we refuse to know,
which are often our own. I think of you here,
where you haven’t been in years.
There’s a flaw in the wood of the door
or my own madness that welcomes the wind
although it is summer, although I am winter.
You could see the sea from the desert
on a night when no one comes to harm you,
an evening when bombs go off somewhere as planned.
We could be letters. Sent here
to warn each other of a much better time.
We could be no one. And for nothing.
For what?
DARK MATTER
The living looking for eternity
don’t know eternity is brief.
A favorite thing about being alive
or other questions no one asks me,
and it would be knowing people.
Knowledge through time.
What’s the name of that hour in the day
where no matter our planned futures
everything is full of nothing
as the world is full of people
without reason other than small chance.
You are tired and most singular
in the middle of the afternoon
when seeing you on the street
(and not in a bedroom) reminds me you’re real,
allowing me to begin the rest of this poem.
Because life isn’t enough
which is unbelievable to the fog, sea,
or anything lucky to be
without our incurable consciousness.
Vanishing. A once-orange leaf that’s been
left in a book. The silver handles
of the casket as it’s lowered into the earth.
People’s mistakes. Dark matter.
The sky just before evening.
One boat in the Atlantic.
A handful of balloons going all the way up.
The few places in the world where it’s raining
as you read this. As I write this.
As I read this out loud and somewhere
what is expected does not return.
The last lamp in an old house.
How I’m not sure if I’d like to end on an image
of someone turning it on, turning it off.
Silences. Between the waves and beneath them.
People’s mistakes. People’s mistakes.
1969
The summer everyone left for the moon
even those yet to be born. And the dead
who can’t vacation here but met us all there
by the veil between worlds. The No. 1 song
in America was “In the Year 2525”
because who has ever lived in the present
when there’s so much of the future
to continue without us.
How the best lover won’t need to forgive you
and surely take everything off your hands
without having to ask, without knowing
your name, no matter the number of times
you married or didn’t, your favorite midnight movie,
the cigarettes you couldn’t give up,
wanting to kiss other people you shouldn’t
and now to forever be kissed by the earth.
In the earth. With the earth.
When we all briefly left it
to look back on each other from above,
shocked by how bright even our pain is
running wildly beside us like an underground river.
And whatever language is good for,
a sign, a message left up there that reads:
“Here men from planet Earth first set foot
upon the moon, July 1969 A.D.
We came in peace for all mankind.”
Then returned to continue the war.
WAITING AT STONEWALL
It’s a Friday in New York
and fifty years from ’69.
Though since we’ve yet to meet
or have, and are still looking,
what we’ve said to each other
in photos and films, bars
and basements, returns
with enough echo
to remind us of ourselves.
Those of us who resisted heroes
and sentiment. Those of us
who waited and found neither—
not the promised liberation
in marriage, or the salvation
of laws. How some asked
to carry America’s guns
and did. How others knew
equality was a rumor,
elusive as freedom or sex.
Do you think