from The Landscapes Were in My Arms

A dredge of evergreens over the window. Your father who wakes up to wait for us. Christmas rain surrounding our sleep in the Sound. It boils down to seven hundred seventy-nine letters. To I love all the blood and piss and water in you. In a mirror onto our bed, set adrift. To the Adriatic, to the Aegean. Don’t run away from me. To twenty-seven distinct cities. To my right eye’s an aquamarine, the left an emerald. It boils down to a small light enfolded in oranges. A hallway, a plank. It boils down to a keyhole view of little more than a little lace—a bride going by.

*

On loop, this play of modesty—you calling the house a pile of bricks. Forever the image of rectangles stacked without mortar, little figurines threatened beneath them. A dark stain back-lit by the traveling sun. I don’t know if it’s rising or falling, since this isn’t episodic but remote. When the little girl I was thinks of me, I’m driving. She’s half right about the picture revising itself. Out of nowhere a steeple traumatizes the skyline, but landscape is wrongly fed by the drama of devotion.

*

Sharpened on the wrong grief. Risk both good and wrong—rutted and bottomless. What, with a mother’s love, would salve me?

*

They call this tissue bleed: accidents lend themselves to landscapes, animals, or the suffocating tangle of just one color. Black strikes interrupt flat green and blue pools like the continent cut itself open. And is this a painting, a poem, or a sharp plummet out of safety?

*

The Woman in White folds her arms like a decision. She’s as real as Picasso gets, though her hair breaks into ethereal cartoon. When I say his portraits worshipped a mythical midday, I’m not exactly finding you in the painting. She’s not the elsewhere. This is the elsewhere—the rope of tightening air, bouquets of hidden lilac, but enough green evidence to keep walking. What’s so imaginary about her disappointment, smoked out of bed, caught in her nightdress.