I. The Estranged Wife

A poem needs rooms, it needs the conceit
of a history. Seal this history
in an envelope, push it underneath
a lonely woman’s door. Make it evening.
Give her things she can use: a living room,
a fireplace, a small lamp on a table,
a telephone, a window, the moon,
a row of photographs on the mantel.
Sometime after midnight, the telephone
will ring. When she answers, she may study
the pictures, then come to a conclusion.
Her left ear is warm. She is listening.
Every picture is a discrete moment
which has indiscreetly lost its moment.

II. Twilight of the Idols

The day passes, the autumn light slanting
through the blinds and onto the window ledge
as the sun tangents the tips of the trees.
Our two black cats hide underneath the bed
when an airplane passes in the distance,
its low rumble lingering in the sky
then tapering slowly into silence
along with the last vestiges of light.
The neighborhood dogs bark in unison
at some indiscernible animal
and the blue glow of the television
casts cobalt shadows on the bedroom wall.
I pull you toward me to kiss your neck,
your cold back pressing against my stomach.

III. The Lucid Husband

The moon crystallized to sugar last night,
Ants crawled over its surface, gathering
in craters, visible to naked eyes.
It was shaping into a strange morning:
the paper was delivered an hour late,
our cat menaced a bag in the corner—
outside the front window, a meter maid
wrote tickets without pausing her scooter,
like Lao Tzu scribbling the Tao Te Ching
on horseback. Even more peculiar:
the furniture was gone—the house empty,
save for a small radio on the floor,
Patsy Cline’s sweet tremolo now drifting
from the living room into the kitchen.

IV. Lover’s Leap

A phone is ringing in the upstairs room.
You answer it politely in your mind—
perhaps your future ghost is calling you,
to tell you now to look beneath the blinds,
carefully pull upon the vinyl string
and bare the pages of a tattered will
purposely lodged between the frosted teeth
of a splintered pane and the window sill,
a checklist for the hopeful suicide
to review before some Brechtian leap—
just a cursory glance may well suffice
to nudge you further from the edge of sleep.
Feed the cat. Return your physician’s call.
Make sure you clear the hedges when you fall.

Garden walks are fraught with implications:
a kiss in Gethsemane’s shaded slopes
gave rise to wars and coronations,
zealots trading blades for priestly robes;
under Athens’ trellises, lads pressed
to catch the Master’s quips like drops of wine;
and Babylonian kings, in arbors dressed,
read battle scripts in every tangled vine.
Tonight we graft ourselves to them—we take
slow steps beneath the interlacing boughs—
each furtive touch a covenant we make,
bound by martyrs, kings, and Aristotle’s brow.
Let reason wait—desire will speak like this:
the breath before the dialectic and a kiss.

On the edge of a hill, on a warm day
I asked you to marry me, and you said:
“There is nothing, not one thing that remains

for me to consider.” The wedding came
and went, we settled into a long bed
on the edge of a hill, on a warm day.

In September, we tirelessly made
new friends, then lovers, who’d come to forget
there is nothing, not one thing that remains

constant in this life. We lost them in May,
and then became bitter, filled with contempt
on the edge of a hill, on a warm day.

“I love you” we said each night through the pain,
like a rote incantation to the dead.
There is nothing, not one thing that remains

sacred, I thought. By June, you moved away,
the house empty, our money divided.
On the edge of a hill, on a warm day
there is nothing, not one thing that remains.

Why was I so compelled, that speaking those
words, I felt a shift—some tacit wheel
turning in the current of our lives?
I’m no mystic. Such visions do not heal.
I’m secretly bourgeois. Do I love you?
I want to be an ascetic—slip the rope,
step from the ledger of desire and rue,
leave little but a name, a fact, a hope.
From Siddhartha to Schopenhauer, all
nihilism keeps its counsel in the dharma:
Desire is the root of suffering—the small
and local truth behind this mantra:
Why was I so compelled, those words released?
A current broke. Something reversed. Or ceased.

I.

Be as an empty house. Send your guests away
and let the halls go dim. Block out your children.
Lower the blinds. Let the muted gray
settle into the shape your quiet has taken.
Assign each pain its room—unfurnished, plain—
a presence you know by outline alone.
Enter when you must. Leave when you regain
the small composure absence makes its own.
The ascetic is a vessel, narrow and exact,
a conduit pared to what he will endure.
He divines the little he can of the house intact
and lets the unsolved chambers remain obscure.
There is no time for solace or display.
Only the discipline of turning things away.

II.

The romance of leaving. The romance of staying.
Two bodies in the same unlit corridor,
each testing the frame, each quietly weighing
what is kept, what loosens, what presses for more.
You built the inner rooms again—unadorned,
its thresholds cleared, the echoes unbidden.
You crossed it lightly, believing you had mourned
what needed release, your solitude thinned
to something almost bearable. Yet she arrived
without design, and took a room untouched—
a chamber neither grief nor will supplied,
though both had held the others just enough.
Whatever emptiness promised to allay,
she is the one you must never turn away.

There is the image that is removed
from the source: the room unmaking space
around a candle—the light denuded,
a breath withdrawing from its place.
Or the space around that breath—where we
hold our bodies in the mirror’s frame,
repeating some inherited degree
of mother, father—gestures without name.
To be inside and outside the room,
to be inside and outside our bodies—
the light does not distinguish. Assume
the eye returns to where it used to be,
and thought, unlit, divides what we are taught:
two bodies bending toward one thought.

Spilled wine spreads to the edge of my napkin
over the course of dinner. I confess
my wife has thirteen ribs—then I open
a third bottle as we compare traumas.
The gay waiter interposes his tray
with the indifference of a Greek chorus:
“Our most popular sin is the soufflé.”
An hour later, my red napkin could pass
for a thin sheet of venison tartare.
The waiter pours two flutes of Kir Royal,
palms the bill, then impatiently stacks chairs
behind us. You lean back from the table
as if you were Isaac baring his chest
braced for a father’s judgment.

The reeds give way. The footing turns to silt;
Cold takes the calves, the knee, the thighs.
The bank recedes; the center remains still.
A form goes under, circles multiply.
The surface splits, reforms. A clean design
of rings moves outward, thins, and disappears.
Above, the scattered light aligns—
no skew remains; no tremor perseveres.
A woman cleaves the sheen, a lucid cut;
the surface yields, then closes where it split.
Around her, freshened currents rut
what leaves her skin returns, unwrit.
If meaning asks for argument:
The surface holds. The rest is spent.

I:

The fountains lift; the plastic geese fall out of time.
Still water brings them back in line again.
Wind lifts the hanging moss; the red gazebo shines
then settles back from view, half-hidden.
A weight shifts in the hedges’ shade,
then jackdaws break—a unison of black;
the sun is crossed, then instantly remade,
as if the air itself had folded back.
Across the lake, a bird suspends itself,
then drops, the water closes where it dived.
No shape returns—only the widening swell
of rings, the water’s surface misaligned.

II:

The water holds. I stand where something sank.
My breath comes late, as if it missed a cue.
The surface shines—a clean and polished blank,
and I am what it will not give to view.
The sky repairs itself. The birds unmake
their blackness, thinning into leaves.
I feel the air forget the cut it took;
my body keeps what light retrieves.
The moss parts; the red returns; the fountains rise.
The geese resume their harmless, hollow spin.
I take my place beside the watching eyes
and feel the surface closing in.

He moves—the mountain tamped in fog,
the lake a blade laid flat and cold,
its ridge-line edged with ash and ferns
that scour the cut where water logs
its margins, where the light won’t hold.
Birds cross the sky in hooked returns;
their bodies score the water clean,
whose surface bends their angled forms,
catching daylight at the shoals:
stone to breath, breath to sheen—
he moves; the morning burns.