A window imagines
remote constellations

and the moon resists each
association, not like anything

they compare it to.
I spend the night thinking

about gravity’s grip on the bed,
the body. About the way

blood behaves, conscious
of pulse; counting. Habit

like pacing unyielding boards.
In the dream you are holding me.

Then mornings flush radiant;
the phone will ring and be answered.

In our separate cities, we are always
talking. Traffic distant on two streets,

voice and idiom slip one to another
(you say capacities, say caprices).

Today half of everything drops
to the pavement. I think you mean

losing ground but you say falling apart.
There is a lapse. An aside. There is

a faraway word, glimmering
impossible. Afternoon I call, hear

the machine voice the unchanging
tone and I wonder what will I say.

I spend all day thinking about my heart.
It’s undeniable, the greed

with which the telephone rings and
goes on ringing. In the dream,

you enter the room, you open your mouth
as if you might speak. Wonder

then what did I say. As if you might call
or cry out. You open your mouth:

red lips pink tongue and
the shining white edges of every tooth.

unreachable city regardless it shines
shines now again side-by-side we are
dashlit we are still dreaming the unchanging
view breathtaking i.e. air never decides
if it first enters or leaves the lungs
now this is also the past where tenderly
he hates me all over all neon and blur
a skyline a hemline a faroff nearing
the edge again now silent the heart
stunned static my silent silent we’re blinded
by passing headlights who wouldn’t
lose sight our hours our hands incessant so
unequaled you are familiar you are
hipbone and brow you are perfectly
remembered and perfectly indifferent

Backlit, shoulder
struck bright;

a shadow
a mark of you.

I am unslept
and hollowed.

Brilliant
catastrophes flower,

ambition breaks
into red blossom.

Dreamless, the body
is its own

grave telling.
Never hurry,

my otherwise,
my next.

Cut away
all but the interior.

Blinding,
this recognition:

you here
in this seam of dark.

This is my
misplaced will,

my hazy plan:
I’ll watch as you

become the history
of a hundred

silhouette hours,
the surface

of every
blistering thing.

Echo still had a body then, she was not only a voice. — Ovid

day casts spiny certainties
into corners and it’s clear
that I am or you are not
what the tree limbs predicted
in July-suspended air green and
promising storm violently
spectacular hot and furious
wind winding through houses
believe me I watched their secrets
catch in glow and tangle those
second-story nights headlights fell
into windows and there were horizons
in every dark direction alone at once
we waver and guess we reach across
across we know the secrets aren’t
the interesting part the only part
tonight will be winter and we may
go under we may yet drown and here
in possibility’s dim and quavering
strike I would peel skin from knuckle
and wrist I would give jawbone
or eyelid or tongue even now
the body articulates tremble and gasp
even now your hands drop through me

It might collapse at any moment, the room;
might come apart at the seams. Drifts in mist

in rain; wind shook everything, almost shook
everything loose. A man on the radio says

vulnerability assessment says gap analysis.
Or he calls: years-away voice. Room tilting

precarious above the street. Carry on
at late morning coffee, hover over the paper,

tabled. Already it’s clear how every story
ends. Trees knock branches to glass; wasps

let themselves in without asking. And letters
pile by the door in luminous envelopes.

There is fracture and there is repair. Call or
letter; riddle or time machine. Weeks of storm

and uncertainty and now splintering light
delivered through clouds. A bell, a word,

the hinge in the narrative. Where pieces
came together. The phone might be

an instrument of desire or a means of
containment; a letter might be a compass.

When it turns back on itself like this, the sky
says look away; pretend the end is not upon you.

sound decaying within the ear
and without your chaos memory
born of blue contemplation an eye
first revealing bones or that ever-
wavering reflection and how you are
exceptional again and I observe
your lips open around oh, I see and
naturally I want to reply but
the last lasting dream of tiny frogs
filling my unhinged mouth keeps me
aloft and alert and dressed in disquiet
when you say green as the story goes
you say in this light and slantingly
at the far edge of a fine afternoon but
it’s been raining for days even in this
corner room where I waited and waited
where I heard almost every word

Underwater what the heart can do.
And the lungs—absentminded, wish

like reaching for her, like saying her name.
Open to every watery or lucent, every

incomprehensible thing: hands unfist and
the rushing to fill them. Sea sway unhurried;

dear devoted tide draw the long vowels out.
Painstaking articulation still every word is O.

Wherever you are, imagine the spent form turning
in the current like a song; imagine her hair.

You walk into the sunlight
to make yourself happy.
This is the poem that will tell you
how to live.
It’s set in Paris, so
you’ll eat a croissant
to make yourself happy.

Here, we utter hexameters rarely.

We do confuse what is a command and what
a prayer
statement and threat, question
and answer.

Animals utter indivisible sounds so often
but Aristotle does not call any of them
a letter. Still, an
animal sound will
make yourself happy. Listen to this
kitten. We can call its noises an alphabet without confusion.

And here, you cannot be maimed by the muses.

See leaves in the gutters and salted butter that stands in a bright
rectangle of light like a small giraffe never melting in the sun which
is what you picture when your aim is
to make yourself happy

You eat a lot of things to
make yourself happy. Stick this
piece of meat in your
mouth to
make yourself happy. It’s a good one. The sounds of
sirens outside the window are
gay to the ear that tends
to hear what it needs
to make itself happy. An interesting thought
about dirt or air or water will work
to make yourself happy. Look
from where you are (inside the window) not
where you want to be (outside the window), i.e., to
make yourself happy. This is the way we’ve come
along the dusky boulevards
like eager huskies, taking big steps, eating up
the sidewalks with our big-stepping big-licking legs
making ourselves happy.
Tomorrow we’ll learn all the things to undo in the Making Ourselves
Happy school. First, the hero never moves towards death.

* Credit: This poem first appeared in Grey, and can also be heard online at One Pause Poetry, http://onepausepoetry.org/explore/poets/profile/Sikelianos

“Mamma, how many days do we have

left to live?” Or did she say,

“Mamma, how many days do we have

left before we die?”

This was in the grass in the backyard. I stood up, collecting

what to say.

* credit: from The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead, Coffee House Press, 2013.

the future comes to me
with a horrifying screech
then it comes to me softly
like a weeping cloud
and it comes to me like
a fish, glass-eyed, flopping
and it comes to me erotically
meanly & sharp
it comes to me cashed out rolling
electronically

in my future life I was
a cowboy, killed
in a bar fight

a flamingo in the snow

* credit: from The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead, Coffee House Press, 2013.

First we were somewhat Italian, and we sipped espressos on the plazas and watched the pigeons make loops and lunges like thoughts, then we were mostly French, eating hot chocolate with a spoon and reading Nadja, then we were more Greek, sipping Nescafés, riding boats to dry and beautiful islands. Soon we were a little bit British, though we knew nothing about it, yet said shove a bum on English couches. We were never Chinese or German but then we read Celan & Goethe & Hölderlin & we were a tiny bit Japanese and took to taking the waters in the mountains outside of small towns in Idaho or having sex with the ex-principals of public junior high schools in the suburbs of Cincinnati, or waking amidst goose poop on islands in the Detroit River, not knowing which way was Canadian nor daylight, next we were driving a Chrysler through Kansas and it was summertime, the air conditioning blown out, the long fields of high grasses.

* credit: from The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead, Coffee House Press, 2013.

The snow falls, picks itself up, dusts itself off
a sparrow flying like a leaf back up to its tree
The future does a backbend toward you, it’s
what you can almost see, scrimmed
in the clouds which crowd the sky, elbowing, laughing

After that I see space and its influence in a bucket of spinning water
and two calcium atoms shoot forth, twinned photons traveling

back to back, arms unlaced, perfect
swimmers in the lit dusk

Where are they going?

First, to Holland, then
to calcium-kiss her bones

And in Holland the streets are made of water, the dolls & dogs gather
round lit picnic tables like happy rags

The body is in the root cellar

When snow falls our dead gather close to our bones
because the cold’s ghost has come back to haunt the cold & the body,
too, is a happy rag

Tree, take a photograph of her thought, you can do it
with photosynthesis: silhouettes of seals appear, a swarmed planet and its satellites, a celestial atlas that breaks when tapped (it’s glass)
Some giraffes, some elephants, a lion scatter
in the clearing; in the clearing

the leaves of the world turn toward the light as do the letters of the word
the words are beautiful not for their accuracy but for their dream:
words-are-arrows that loop between no-man’s-land and the wetlands, soft
flints flying toward their target

—words bird the zone—

when home was adopted as mother
area was given here
[a future of] all surface, no border

* credit: This poem first appeared on Poets.org/ The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day. Published in The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead, Coffee House Press, 2013.