Poems December 2020

If I open that door
Go in that room
Sit at that table
Across from those disinterested eyes
That look everywhere else

If I eat alone in silence
Just the click of my jaw
The imagined hum of a busy spider
Working on a web for me
To stick me here

If I explore the rooms
Still in dust
Tiny things in the air
Brushes and an armoire
An empty smell to it all

A weird sensation of a nose, a face close by mine, but lipless, and gone, or never there

Using a corner of a wall to scratch my own back

Someday they’ll come and ask, “What have you lost” and the only answer is: “Everything. And everybody.”

This long night
Is waiting like whoever drove to the emergency room after the accident
Checking its watch at the sound of a red eye out of Kennedy

Do words have the power to unmake the damage? These words, tapped into a phone?

On the other side, consider what is done in each second, and which are left empty
While hovering over the bed watching the doctors reassemble you
It’s the winter ritual that goes back
Back further than It’s a Wonderful Life,
Back to mammoths and meat and staring into a fire

Consider what is done in each second

At 7:15 the sun returns — see it climb over the houses and climb with it.