The Curve
4 Holding a Freshwater Fish in a Pail above the Sea
6 Hi, Melissa
7 Poem to My Litter
8 Dawn of Man
9 Black Bulls
2
1 For Crow
2 To Randal, Crow-Stealer, Lord of the Greenhouse
3 Sky-Sex Dreams of Randal
4 Stalking My Ex-Girlfriend in a Pasture
5 Mommy Harangues Poor Randal
6 Lyric Complicity for One
3
1 Poem About My Wife Being Perfect and Me Being Afraid
2 When I Criticize You, I’m Just Trying to Criticize the Universe
3 Poem in Which My Shrink Is a Little Boy
4 Radiation in New Jersey, Convalescence in New York
5 Poem Set in the Day and in the Night
6 Poem to My Dog, Monday, on Night I Accidentally Ate Meat
7 Troy
8 Heaven Is Us Being a Flower Together
9 Afternoon
4
1 Second Dream
2 Plush Bunny
3 Crow Says Goodbye
4 Appeal to My First Love
5 The Big Loser
6 The Vacuum Planet of the Pee Pee Priestess
7 The Blimp
8 The End
9 Touching the Floor
10 Zyprexa, the Snow Pills
11 Snow Angels
12 The Hanging Gardens
13 Universe Where We Weren’t Artists
Acknowledgments
1
LIVING IT UP
The bed is on fire, and are you laughing?
You leave the bed
and leave me without thought.
The springs want to embrace each other
but they’re afraid if they break
their spiral, they will never
be able to hold anyone.
I wish you would let me know
how difficult it is to love me.
Then I would know you love me
beneath all that difficulty.
You are tending not only to me, you tell me,
but to your other child—the air,
and air puts his feet in my slippers,
and air scrubs his teeth on my brush,
and we must learn to share a bed,
we must learn to share a body.
The money is running out.
We will have to split one needle
this winter—one end for me,
one end for air.
THE CURVE
Something, call it X, wanted a body
so it made our bodies.
But our bodies weren’t right for it—
gum around the bones,
a rash of gold or black,
eyes like blisters
leaking fondness.
*
X realized all animal bodies were like this, so it made language.
*
Language forced X into the body
like carbonation into a soda.
When I hear the word rock,
a translucent lump
shimmers in front of the world.
To its right, a piece of glass cuts a clear finger,
and to its left, there pulses a rocky, low, cold crust.
*
Though the images
vary exhaustingly and troublingly,
I always remember
the spoke of earth
cutting into the ocean
we saw from above, on a bicycle ride,
the sheen of the bicycles
spreading over the earth,
distinct
