Dean Young
Four a.m. and the trees in their nocturnal turns
seem free from our ideas of what trees should be
like the moment in a dance you let your partner go
and suddenly she's loose fire and unapproachable.
Yesterday I saw L again, by a case of kiwis
and she seemed wrongly tall as if wearing cothurni.
Would it be better never to see her at all?
In Jim's poem about death, shirts pile on a chair.
I imagine them folded, the way shirts are,
arms behind the back, then boxed in mothballs
and marked with Magic Marker, Jim's Shirts.
Probably what would really happen
is his wife might save a few to hang among her own.
Even that off-the-shoulder thing of hers
commingled with grief, overlapping ghosts.
The rest she'd give away, maybe dump
in a Salvation Army bin in some parking lot
or just drop off in People's Park. It scares me
to think of that guy with sores on his face
trying on the parrot shirt. It scares me
how well it fits. Maybe if I just walked up to her
and said, Enough. Maybe she still has my blue belt.
Outside, the rain riffs off the shingles, wind
mews down the exhaust tube of my heater.
On the isinglass flames rush in smudges
like lovers who must pass through each other
as punishment for too much lust and feeding.
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