LIFT these three

Until a Creche

My body has grown expensive with light.

Some feelers are searching the garden.

This Japanese lantern.

I have become a Japanese lantern,

that soft light

on the cold, empty patio.

I could cry. Why could I cry?

A glowing at the place where the dark begins.

The rain extinguishes the light. Or could.

My body has grown expensive with light.

When light tumbles out and walks

in the garden, in the cool of the evening.

It is too easy to be intellectual

about a thing like this.

Bang Shut

When I hear the screen door,

So comes the emptying of the house.

My house is empty. Banging shut,

an inadvertence. But perhaps,

I was so young, so young.

I thought no door could bang shut

and not be a name.

The name of emptiness, of emptying.

My house is empty.

Now I will spend the afternoon alone.

There’s not a person in the world

who would believe me. Believe me.

The wire is woven and pushed out

in the corners. That sound of wings.

So angels sing behind the glass,

caught between the screen and the glass

Now I will listen to the angels singing.

There’s not a person in the world

who would believe me. Believe me.

That is what I have to thank the afternoon for:

The banging shut. The angels beating

her terrific wings. This is the thanks

they get. I was so young, so young.

And can I have the heart to leave him

singing for twenty years, for thirty years

in that empty house? This is the thanks

I get.

Wrung Dry My

So when the daily vision of even the ones I love

cuts me like knives.

It cuts me like knives. I am not ordinary.

Today, this week. I am not ordinary.

But that must be a normal feeling.

It makes everything I have done

regrettable. I cannot list them all.

Perhaps I can say

whatever is not here. I am sorry for it.

Whatever is not standing on my tongue.

I have injured everything I have touched,

and many or all of everything else.

When I walked through your tide pool of a heart

and bent over a carefully lifted the things

that looked like life, I was careful,

and I was careful about where I put my feet.

But some things were evidently killed,

some life. No matter how invisible.

I still can’t count them.

Nothing is less alive for being small.

I am wrung.

They don’t mean it. They step carefully.

They lift me with their thumb

and forefinger, like so. The sound of ocean.

It seems to be always bringing something.

But that must be a normal feeling.

 It is time to address where these poems come from. They are an expression of victimization when I was young. Written in a single afternoon reaching back to childhood recalling sounds and the way we pay no attention to the fullness of being that belongs to children. I figured out, thirty years afterward, that I had been set upon by a trusted person and used for their gratification. A common crime. Is it wrong to add this kind of explanation. I could be wrong about this; maybe the poems came from somewhere else. The poem "transitive" is the fourth poem in this series. It is a poem of depression and revenge.