Poetry

With no internal shell you keep 
yourself together in a sac
& the matter of attachment.

It couldn’t have been easy getting it to lie flat on paper.
That’s obvious from the asterisks.

You can go down for a jouk, I want to say, a gander 
at the greylags on the green
that’s not so much a field as a grassy space 
where the flats once stood.

a line between the wild and settled regions /
the colored band around heraldic shields
the seam / rim / edge / periphery / the margin brink or limit /

I’d come into the room & try to write
a different ending on those anonymous walls. 
There was less time all the time
until time changed. You know what I mean. 

This hill, even if a small one, this hill with us and the dog the same dog 
forever moving shadow-like down it, to where the hill disappears…For 

If hunted for oil, hunted for light.

After the terror, the whales swarmed.

In the evenings, we watched Jeopardy. 
Wore surgical masks once she got sick.
Before that my mother sent me to the store
for cigarettes all the time. Pack of Salem Lights.

Of birdsongs, I know only three
for certain: cardinal, blue jay, raven,
though perhaps the last two
don’t count—not as song. More call
than song.  More cry, by which I mean

I wore the face of the animal to lure the animal into shooting range.

This was symmetry.