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 was lugging ever
roll anywhere? Me, I prefer a scrappy Prometheus thieving
fire when spring swells tired: every dawn another liver.
In Savannah, Sherman marched but did not burn;
and in that respect we differ because you see,
I want to burn it all. First vice: quick to ire, second:
pride, the most maligned. The antidote? Last season’s leftover ashes
which I’d spread on my forehead to level it, to square it,
to remind me of strange sin until I can’t abide it.
In heaven, I’ll still wait to hear ammo made of gold drop, drop
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