I could use that hand to throw a tomahawk
from this bed and hit neither boat nor star
from way down here,
so far from water.
My sister was young and bicycling before
she died last night
in my dream. Dreams aren’t subtle,
she’d said to prove a point.
Dreams don’t fuck around.
People in my dreams age backward—
my sister’s breasts still smaller than mine,
her legs still
longer, but I stay
my awake-age, always.
The wreck petrified
the witnesses—a woman and her child,
who both looked like me, except
they wouldn’t talk,
wouldn’t show me
the body. She had pedaled
into the road, been hit,
which the newspaper
detailed in its color pointillism
photos—my sister in chalk
outline, my sister’s bicycle
a commemorative art display in the future.
An older man had found her, had called
the too-late ambulance—
I could feel her missing
from me, and her missing felt like my face
waterlogged
to violet, so I woke.
In a thunderstorm,
in our double-bed years
before, she once hushed
me, Don’t worry,
but oh how
she kicked in her sleep.
WHAT IF THROUGH A WINDOW, THOSE ONES?
What if a person’s whole
life were looking quietly
out a window?
That’s not a new idea, but whether it’s a sad story depends
upon the view I reckon.
What if outside the windows were the ancestors
of your lover?
Outside—a slow conveyer belt,
a parade, a mugshot lineup, a reverse death
march of the ones who made the one you love.
Can covetousness break glass?
Seep through the casement like a draft or
a bad odor?
How to thank—
Do not think about the thoughts of the long-gone
people on the other side
of the window. They cannot see
you and probably would not wish
to if they could.
But I thought our forebears look down on—
This is not heaven. This is an exercise.
With a window.
This is an exercise on looking.
Ah.
What do you see?
Aprons.
Good. What is in the pockets of the aprons?
Coins.
I can’t make out the amounts or dates, but they are coins
of varying circumference. No bills.
The waistbands—some of them have
rickrack or frills.
Now I understand
my fortune. Thank you.
You cannot see inside the pockets.
But you—
You know nothing of the ones who made the one
you love. You do not know
their motivations or worries or hairdos except
their worried eyes and picture-day hairdos.
You do not know the wear
of the tread on their bootsoles or whether they wore slippers to bed.
This is not a metaphor.
This is an exercise, an exercise
on looking, which always means imagining,
which means tying together right and wrong and half-right and half-wrong
like a bouquet garni and tossing it thoughtlessly
into the pot, steeping until having
flavored everything.
for Brian
Jon’s brother’s best friend died. She was twenty and likeable.
I made a hamboat and brought over some Bud Light.
Later we all went out to karaoke. I was sadder when my dog died,
but I knew more what to do then, too.
I always wore my seatbelt until this happened,
when I stopped.
What does all that even mean?
In the paper a while back, I learned how at the zoo in my hometown
an elephant’s fall resulted in cracked ribs and its killing—
We went to karaoke. But they would only show the lyrics in Japanese,
so really we were just dancing with our breath
of tequila and French fries. Pop song,
pop song, pop song:
whatever we wanted, we thought we took it.
Eliza’s hair was shorter than yours until you cut it then it was longer and she was dead.
SELF-PORTRAIT WITH GOLDEN AMMO
Easter’s over, meaning it’s time again to resurrect
my vices. Did that boulder Sisyphus