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Who among the numberless you have become desires this moment
Which comprehends nothing more than loss & fragility & the fleeing of flesh?
—LARRY LEVIS
1
HOW TO TRIUMPH LIKE A GIRL
I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
But mainly, let’s be honest, I like
that they’re ladies. As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.
DURING THE IMPOSSIBLE AGE OF EVERYONE
1.
There are so many people who’ve come before us,
arrows and wagon wheels, obsidian tools, buffalo.
Look out at the meadow, you can almost see them,
generations dissolved in the bluegrass and hay.
I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour.
2.
If you walk long enough, your crowded head clears,
like how all the cattle run off loudly as you approach.
This fence is a good fence, but I doubt my own haywire
will hold up to all this blank sky, so open and explicit.
I’m like a fence, or a cow, or that word, yonder.
3.
There is a slow tractor traffic hollering outside,
and I’d like not to be traffic, but the window shaking.
Your shoes are piled up with mine, and the heat
comes on, makes a simple noise, a dog-yawn.
People have done this before, but not us.
THE LAST MOVE
It was only months when it felt like I had been
washing the dishes forever.
Hardwood planks under the feet, a cord to the sky.
What is it to go to a We from an I?
Each time he left for an errand, the walls
would squeeze me in. I cried over the nonexistent bathmat, wet floor of him,
how south we were, far away in the outskirts.
(All the new bugs.)
I put my apron on as a joke and waltzed around carrying
a zucchini like a child.
This is Kentucky, not New York, and I am not important.
This was before we got the dog even, and before I trusted
the paralyzing tranquilizer of love stuck
in the flesh of my neck.
Back home, in my apartment, another woman lived there.
In Brooklyn, by the deli, where everything
was clean and contained.
(Where I grieved my deaths.)
I took to my hands and knees. I was thinking about the novel
I was writing. The great heavy chest of live animals
I had been dragging around for years; what’s life?
I made the house so clean (shine and shine and shine).
I was suspicious of the monkey sounds of Kentucky’s birds,
judging crackles, rusty mailbox, spiders in the magnolia tree,
tornado talk, dead June bugs like pinto beans.
Somewhere I had heard that, after noting the lack
of water pressure in an old hotel in Los Angeles,
they found a woman’s body at the bottom
of
