Poetry

The Earth spun on the Universal fanfare and the three of us were settled on 
the settee when the doorbell sung Big Ben’s [sic] dong, dang, ding, dung.

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.

We had to present proof for everything:  
My mother was born 
August 31, 1954. On that day 
inside the womb of a minute 
she burst from another woman’s life, 

More dark than gray, but not yet quite dark
entirely, the stories keep ending as if there were
a limit to what any story could hold onto, and this
the limit, the latest version of it, looking a lot like the sea
meeting shore. 

Man made the lake to catch the water.

It’s how man gets the gold out of the mountain. 

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.