violets.

I’m having someone over for dinner tomorrow and bought flowers at the market for the occasion. I’m awful with living things, and, convinced the flowers have already wilted—and who knows what state they’ll be in in the morning—thought of this poem from the archives, back when I used to write with flowers all the time. It’s a personal favorite. I was so young once.



Violets



I will kill your flowers,

and I’ll be a little sad, remembering

your shy arrival, as if for the first time

now I live alone,

your ill-fitting sport coat and pat apology: It isn’t much.

It wasn’t.



I have resigned to let the violets die

a peaceful death, dressed in their paper collar,

misted just enough to know they’re not

in desperate pain—Until the upturned faces wilt,

I will not notice health or basic need,

and I assume you will not mind,

or will take it for an accident

or, best, will expect this worst from me

because I don’t have what it takes,

the thing one requires to be two—



I know you want to teach me this,

and you believe you can.

You’ll bring another flower,

another and another—



I will kill them all.


your handkerchief.

Weeks ago a labeled box by the door and a note in the notebook I keep in my bag


for some reason today the word ‘keepsakes’


Don’t tell me the world is my home and a beautiful place when it gives us a bottle


a button



indianapolis.

You’re in the backyard grilling chicken


and I’m watching you


drinking a beer


The grass is green and trimmed


You count twelve bumblebees in the neighbor’s yard


Eventually we go inside


and you take off my clothes


I’m not afraid


and this isn’t the end of it


To the middle-aged Venezuelan woman who has a crush on you.

I don’t expect I’ll ever see you so I conjure you in pants and glasses


hair that’s long and dark and frizzy in the morning


and again late in the day




I used to want his silence too


its batteries and buttons


He never spoke when I gave him my tongue instead of sound


He never seemed to like it


but he let me do it




What I’m trying to say is I know how you want to be reduced


What I’m trying to say is he won’t reduce you


but he’ll let you do it


After you said you slept with someone else

I dreamed common things


My last lover came back


I kept my teeth




The next day I drove


past a man fixing traffic lights in mid-air


and then on to the mall


where I bought six pairs of cotton underwear on sale


carried them in their brown bag back to the car


because there’s a world


and it moves




I should tell you how that man who loved me said I walked ugly and awkward with caution


how even if I did before he said it


I did after


aubade.

In my fantasy I can explain it


how quiet is the way the room contains us


and the way it gives when we expand


how it’s first the skin of your hand


and then your hand


because i want to want to, not to have to.

I’m always so sure this is the moment before the moment they tell me and so I want to eat everything and fuck you against the back of the front door


Driving over the bridge this afternoon I saw two kids I thought one was standing behind the other but when I passed them I saw they were standing beside each other one leaning back with his fingers curled around the chain link between his hand and air I remember because right then I knew I wasn’t home


Last week someone asked how to tell whether we write different stories or different versions of the story


Every morning you ask how I’ve slept


Still every night I try so hard to not sleep


memorandum of understanding.

In my fantasy I can convince you I’m not worth it


I don’t want your secrets


or a common knowledge


the code to get into the building


the doctor appointment on Tuesday


the way we fold towels


It’s not serious and growing


the size of us


I eat alone


My twice-yearly workshop, the Seven Doctors Project, has started again (it doesn’t seem so long at all since I posted my homework from our last semester), and this week, I and a couple other faculty members are going to talk about revision.
Specifically, we’re going to be telling the stories of poems and stories—because of course, they form and shift and shape-change until, eventually, they tell us they’ve grown up and they want to be left alone and get out of the room and close the door already.
Lately, I’ve started a lot of my poems on paper—the older I get, the more urgency I feel to write things down as soon as they appear. In the past, I’d chew on a line in my head for days, wait until the poem was nearly fully formed before sitting down to bang it out. But lately, I like the mess of writing. The hard black line through the wrong words. The little arrows and insertions. It feels alive—or at least qualms my fear of forgetting what must be written, and that it must written in the first place.
Most of the things I post here are second or third drafts—this blog is a blog of poems in the middle of being written, mostly. The poem posted just before this post, for example, doesn’t look now like what it did when I posted it—and that post was of course different than the poem’s beginning.
If writing is a process of trying to work out a problem, it’s doubly so. There’s working out a problem, and then there’s working out the problem of articulating that process.
I start always with the things that happen, and then, what those things look like—the stuff of them, the little scenes, their rhythm. Revision is about sharpening, cutting. It’s no surprise I like intimacy and violence in the poem—I write with intimacy and violence, too.
I don’t know what story I’m going to tell in class this week. But today, I thought I’d tell the small story of the most recent poem I’ve written—show you how it started (above), and where it went (the post previous), and where, at least for now, it ended up (right here).

In the bathroom cleaning the wound

Later I’ll think of the scene a friend wrote
the chainsaw chewing bone
the waiting for an answer and trajectory of blood
the man who told her none of that was romance

Here let me hold back this flap of skin while you go in for gravel
I came up with a handful of it from the street where we were walking on our walk for tomatoes
held a little blood
and told the origin of dirt’s accord
the bag of earth and air
the molecules that made that fragrance

Your head is so close to mine
when you slip the flat blade sideways into flesh
work out the first black rock

My twice-yearly workshop, the Seven Doctors Project, has started again (it doesn’t seem so long at all since I posted my homework from our last semester), and this week, I and a couple other faculty members are going to talk about revision.

Specifically, we’re going to be telling the stories of poems and stories—because of course, they form and shift and shape-change until, eventually, they tell us they’ve grown up and they want to be left alone and get out of the room and close the door already.

Lately, I’ve started a lot of my poems on paper—the older I get, the more urgency I feel to write things down as soon as they appear. In the past, I’d chew on a line in my head for days, wait until the poem was nearly fully formed before sitting down to bang it out. But lately, I like the mess of writing. The hard black line through the wrong words. The little arrows and insertions. It feels alive—or at least qualms my fear of forgetting what must be written, and that it must written in the first place.

Most of the things I post here are second or third drafts—this blog is a blog of poems in the middle of being written, mostly. The poem posted just before this post, for example, doesn’t look now like what it did when I posted it—and that post was of course different than the poem’s beginning.

If writing is a process of trying to work out a problem, it’s doubly so. There’s working out a problem, and then there’s working out the problem of articulating that process.

I start always with the things that happen, and then, what those things look like—the stuff of them, the little scenes, their rhythm. Revision is about sharpening, cutting. It’s no surprise I like intimacy and violence in the poem—I write with intimacy and violence, too.

I don’t know what story I’m going to tell in class this week. But today, I thought I’d tell the small story of the most recent poem I’ve written—show you how it started (above), and where it went (the post previous), and where, at least for now, it ended up (right here).




In the bathroom cleaning the wound




Later I’ll think of the scene a friend wrote


the chainsaw chewing bone


the waiting for an answer and trajectory of blood


the man who told her none of that was romance




Here let me hold back this flap of skin while you go in for gravel


I came up with a handful of it from the street where we were walking on our walk for tomatoes


held a little blood


and told the origin of dirt’s accord


the bag of earth and air


the molecules that made that fragrance




Your head is so close to mine


when you slip the flat blade sideways into flesh


work out the first black rock


after falling.

Later I’ll think of the scene a frend wrote


the saw


the crack of bone


the waiting for an answer and trajectory of blood


the man who told her none of that was romance




Here let me hold back this flap of skin while you go in for gravel


I came up with a handful of it from the street where we were walking on our walk for tomatoes


held a little blood


and told the origin of dirt’s accord


the bag of earth and air and molecules that made that smell




Your head is so close to mine


when you slip the flat blade sideways into flesh


work out the first black rock


dream poem 6.

Last night I dreamed our sheets were strung up in the basement my mother was there was a rhythm into the mouth of the washer and out shaking out towels I came up behind and she turned and was startled to see me to see what was behind me and after I died I was still there and transparent and she could still see me I don’t know where she got the roll of clear tape we’ll do this she said and she tore off a piece and a piece and a piece and stuck each to the space where my throat had been whole