sometimes the snow
reminds me of loss
how it blurs the silhouette and
takes what it takes into
its long white mouth
the way our memory 
of the dead or abandoned
are blurred to imagination
taken from us or neglected by us
and not unlike the longing 
of a vacated chair 
left askew, as if it should 
hold something again
the shape of a hip or a sigh
but doesn't.
​

I.
because I am
so sad and ordinary
my eyes brown
like common nuts
I go down to the river
at midnight to
bathe hoping to
take on a little
sheen from the moon
maybe, and glisten.

II.
it is an ordinary thing
perhaps, to be told
we are loved but it is
extraordinary to
believe it.
the nesting owlets
open their sickled
beaks and are fed.
again the sun is tossed
into the air at 5am
and the phloem
of trees flutes
water into the leaves
that wave thankfully
over this rare earth
daughter to a common
star. we wake up
believing we won’t live
but we do, proving that
even the dead haven’t
left us and the light is
truly ours.

III.
I will take the word
into my mouth
and repeat it
the way the holy
and mad can’t help
themselves from reciting.
and in exchange I will
not die slowly.
IV.
I am ordinary
but in this
light the entire
world is silver.
dear world, I am
sorry I did not
believe that you
left me here
to live.

I.
I am thinking of the going of things
of the eventual tiger
of love 
of the disappearance 
of certain trees
or all trees. 
there is an ocean of things that 
went and can't ever be got back
not if we prayed hard and 
skun our knees doing it
like the moa like the mammoth like 
the dripping minutes like unmouthed words 
the relentless passing and eventual forgetting
threshold of the Place of Lost Things--
what the old mapmakers were 
thinking when they marked the End of the World 
on their beige parchment and trembled 
like malarial surgeons--

II.
which I would like to visit, and get lost in myself 
among the mysterious dead among the old stone walls 
that run on to the moon among the dreams
devoured by breakfast among
gods we invented or murdered 
by way of my feet tracking beaches
cobbled in missing pennies.

III.
to build a kind life there 
among the Gone which is limitless and
unsubmitting to further time
and not lament 
the world of the Present and Accounted 
with its long list of Things That Shall Exist 
each with its little check-box, 
each with its little expiration date.
​