Poem of the Week

1.

I have turned my back on the mountains. Let the sun have them.

Let the sun have the river as well, I am done with it.

I am done with the sun and the mountains and the river.

Now I will stare at the spines of books.

At the spines, and the hinges, and the knobs.

The spines of books hold a chorus

singing from the dead to the living,

and from the living back to the dead.

I was about to reread The House of Mirth

but then recalled that we read it aloud to each other,

chapter by chapter, in bed. The sun

is setting behind my back. Behind

the knobs are secrets. I will

tell about them another time. The files are

useful; neither fully open nor shut.

I was speaking to a young man about

the ineffable. He seemed to want to find a way

to say it. I said the nature of

the ineffable is the unsayable.

The spines’ address is inward and outward,

the once and never more recurring, binding

there into here, like the quick shadow of that bird.

2.

The story anticipates its assembly

under a punitive moon.

Remember me. Was that a question?

Hard to say. And don’t look up.

Questions burden us

toward landscapes of old-growth trees

and the terror of the kill. Hi, it’s me again,

I had a dream in which things

happened that do not and will not

in real life. I look up into

the disobedient figure of the real

and resent its sentence.

I am not a platform. The body

foresees its future, playing a certain tune

aside or beside the point

of beautiful unfolding. Belonging, yes, but

to whom or to what? I apologize. I looked up

at the eternally weeping willow.

Widow? Window? I can’t tell in this dark.