Some Things I Know Before I Go
I am a harsh critic and an open stomach.
I am harshest to the inside of the world.
To my relations, to art.
Come over for breakfast, we’ll wake, eat hot.
Come over for dinner, I have a room of cold, it holds.
I am interested in cycle: to eat, to eat again.
What happens not only in the night but in the morning.
If I say “you” I will eat you.
If I say you, you are the afternoon.
If I mean it, it becomes you.
I live in New York.
I miss and I miss.
I go with these certainties: I call them languages.
An American Poem
Last winter,
I used to buy cake from that bakery
and freeze it for a fortnight.
Even in the depths of it, the moon
must finish luminously.
This makes L laugh. That’s good.
We’re on a walk,
I’m late to work, I’m always late as a bird
dressed in white.
There’s the corner where those people who’ve lost It
are very loving to each other.
I pull L away from the
smoking tin—
it’s important to be somebody saving some.
Seasonally, objects shake their memory.
Cars lose their windows,
people lose their windows,
trees, too.
No snow yet this year.
The end? Dry as night.
Cobwebs on balconies.
People clean, hungry, dirty, filled.
I’ll call this ‘An American Poem’
and it, too, is.
L tells me, I never want to see you
see fresh snow. It would fester me.
When I was a teacher, I learned to instruct children—
when you take something from someone
look at the person
not the object.
Poem For The Animal
The cat settles on me, in our heat
I’ve taken to cradling a few things since your leaving
most significantly the cat, who I hold like a severed head.
There are two people fucking downstairs on
the eve of one of their birthdays. Upstairs, the cat and I
turn the dial— night.
One comes up for water.
Goodnight, Noa. They descend.
I stay Infinite as a palm.
The room and I rot.
I can’t forget the children
who bike up and down the block
and spend their winter hunting rats at our stoop.
They are in their brave childhood.
The cat twitches in my arms.
The present is an animal.
I’m here, too.
