I set a story in this skylight’s frame.
Winter. Instead of yard,
forest pricked
by deer, twins in blue.
I omitted the wall’s
new oozy purple,
how the mud thrashed
the block’s dead end,
how the creek swallowed
the triangle called “dog yard”
from which the deer were said
to have emerged.
And there was a space in the copse
we did not call a clearing
And we know that when Dad sells the house
we will not return here
And a drop of acid on a flame
creates a brilliant flash of color
And a poem in the new book is blue
And at work the cyan cartridge leaks
And when I first learned to drive I bled
And quickly cooled and turned obsidian
When I was young I rode the train to know
speed, and sleep, which we didn’t have at home,
not me, not any of us, and for no particular reason,
just the vague shapes in grass John sees these days
more menacingly: the shredded fawn, its inevitable
rhyme with our old way of looking at things, the lawns
quilted out like plots, like holes to disappear a little body in,
and trust in the benign stranger was good, and I believe
in random nature, I do, that there had been a hawk
and a weaker creature, because nothing clawed
in our neighborhood beside the birds, and we
did not pray then.
Miss Forceful Wants You 