Going Home Hungry
They don’t know how to talk to me,
so keep offering me dessert.
“No thanks. No thanks. No thanks.”
They want me to aid and abet
their custard of the day
but I’ve spent too much time
in church basements
figuring out the line
between someone else’s hunger
and my own.
No, thanks.
I wish my sisters were here to laugh and hide behind.
I wish I lived in a city full of serendipity and drift or
I wish I didn’t need diagonals in order to feel set into motion.
Hitching rides, finding my way by foot
or wheels or just lying in a hammock
fuzzing out.
My friends need holding
of their babies and their grief
so I appear and in return
am ferried along.
“I can take you anywhere.”
“You’ve always said that.”
“I know.”
Meeting at the marina on a day between storms so sharp
I almost believe what they’re saying
about the hand of God.
Every year the sky clears
and we ride.
Grandpa’s radar man, Mom’s sponge rules, Uncle John reading
Ginsberg on Cezanne on his tablet:
“a go-between for minute rowboats.”
“That’s us moving on this earth, which is a lot water,” I say.
I’m wedged open, receptive, at last seen as the scribe.
On the back porch young boys feed me lines
as their parents hand me plates.
“Knowledge is the fruit of wisdom;
you must savor it carefully,
unlike that lunch you’re bolting down.”
Mom texts from a restaurant far from home
while I’m buying wine at the shop next door
so I know it’s time to head to the next station.
Serendipity
or drift. Drip or hold.
I wander over.
“The dog Heather had to give up
froze when he saw her again,”
I tell her as I sit down at the table.
“What does that mean, he froze? Like a deer?”
Like a deer. Local similes
and everyone keeps talking about
building character
until I can feel my overdeveloped flair
for getting through the winter
extend from me
like a shovel as prosthetic limb.
It will be dark for a long time and then soon after
the smother
it will be light.
Today’s that day.
At Southern Thrift
Not only
do I have
everything
I need, I need
less than I have
Fall Parties Redux
It’s almost fall again
and all the parties are someplace else.
I’m on the consider-yourself-invited-
even-though-you’re-far-away lists.
Sometimes I’m there, anyway,
in dreams or last night
when my friends passed my face
around the Brooklyn bar booth
holding candles under their chins
warming my Tennessee home
like a fireplace video
at a holiday party.
Someone said I was glowing
but I knew it was only low
wattage or screen resolution,
since in fact I was sunk
in a tropical depression.
—Is that a form of ennui?
my new friend asks.
—It’s the kind of sadness
where you suspect you have
no right to be sad
because you’re sipping
a piña colada on the beach.
It’s the weather outside
and the weather of
missing feeling
embodied.
We’re parking her car
in a giant lot, then digging
through the dollar bin for prizes
for her Twist Party Dance-Off
tonight. So, yes,
some of the parties are here—
and yes I’m the first to arrive,
lugging my old devotion.
I mix the signature drink,
spiral lemon peel poorly,
watch the children,
take the pictures,
hook up the music
like a friendly ghost for hire
from a service that dispatches
shy strippers and bitter clowns,
then wake up the next day
suspecting I failed to show.
