Dear Life 

I can’t undo all I have done to myself,

what I have let an appetite for love do to me. 

I have wanted all the world, its beauties 

and its injuries; some days, 

I think that is punishment enough.

Often, I received more than I’d asked,

which is how this works—you fish in open water

ready to be wounded on what you reel in.

Throwing it back was a nightmare.

Throwing it back and seeing my own face

as it disappeared into the dark water.

Catching my tongue suddenly on metal,

spitting the hook into my open palm.

Dear life: I feel that hook today most keenly.

Would you loosen the line—you’ll listen 

if I ask you, 

if you are the sort of life I think you are. 

Wound is the Origin of Wonder

The bee that worshiped the mouths of those flowers 

dropped to your window like a spent priest,

its thud comedic in the coded silence.

You were making a change to the order of your hours,

had announced as much in the prior moment,

and if I thought of Virgil’s Georgics, it was only

not to mention them. I brought my eye 

to its abdomen, offered an ounce of my human life. 

What would you do with the knowledge

that I’d grieve for a bee? Someone like me 

could be played by the threat of endings.

I’ll lose you one day, have lost you always,

a long ongoing Westwardness of thought.

It’s not metaphor that bees make honey 

of themselves while language only dreams 

the hunted thing. Let’s be hungry a little 

while longer. Let’s not hurt each other if we can.

Letters in Winter

There is not one leaf left on that tree

on which a bird sits this Christmas morning,

the sky heavy with snow that never arrives,

the sun itself barely rising. In the overcast

nothingness, it’s easy to feel afraid,

overlooked by something that was meant

to endure. It’s difficult today to think 

clearly through pain, some actual,

most imagined; future pain I try lamely

to prepare myself for by turning your voice

over in my mind, or imagining the day

I’ll no longer hug my father, his grip

tentative but desperate all the same.

At the café, a woman describes lilacs

in her garden. She is speaking of spring,

the life after this one. It will be spring, 

I say over and over. I see how winter 

is forbidding: it grows the heart 

by lessening everything else and demands 

that we keep trying. I am trying. 

But oh, to understand us,
any one of us, and not to grieve?

The Present Speaks of Past Pain

It’s that hour of dusk 

when the sky is awash 

in waning light, when, if we might

forgive each other, this would be 

the hour for it.

I lay down beneath a yellow tree.

I understood I could hold on to the past

or be happy. 

Then, nothing. You did not appear to me.

The sky filled with stars

that had been there already.

After a Vase Broken by Marcel Proust

What we know, we come to know 

by its undoing; there is no permanent 

exhibit here. Like August stars, we offer 

temporary light, our lives measured 

in latitudes of loss, the longest distance 

between any two points in time.

And, errant, we are covetous: the humble 

vase broken by Marcel Proust re-glued, 

imbued with preciousness. He believed 

that grief develops the mind. What is 

the mind if not that surface upon which 

the world can be endlessly rebroken? 

You hold me in yours as you walk to the sea

and my clothes catch on brier and bramble. 

The view familiar, like a page from a book 

we once wrote, its single copy, in a library that burned.

Signal

“To exchange signals with Mars—without fantasizing, of course—that is a task worthy of a lyric poet.”

—Osip Mandelstam

Of course, the secret aim 

of losing you those months 

had been to find you again. 

I went looking for what

had once belonged to you, 

found a voice to cauterize 

the wound. I made it through 

April, May, June; it seemed

I had outsmarted grief

but pulled the hanged man 

card repeatedly—the self-same 

sorrow said a different way.

You who cannot hear me 

without injury, I whisper, 

I damage the throat like this,

I, my own entrapment

and hardest to forgive. 

Only this life still and all 

its boxes filled, its hours

spent fretting over living wills, 

the horror of numbers

and headlines on Mars—

more water, more life 

where it cannot be touched.

Not the Wound, but What the Wound Implies

Who can say

what the tulips dream 

in a hard frost, 

the sky as cold 

as it is clear

and still unreadable.

Or how pain 

decides what stays 

in memory, a gift

broken by the time 

it reaches us, 

silvered, gleaming with age.

Note: These poems are reprinted from Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton)