Regret

If everybody says
two lines are the same length
research shows
I do too.
And if I decide
to believe, then the light
over the mountain
proves it.
For as long as I’ve been alive
I used to think
that but now I know
this. Nevertheless
when my feet are on my desk
I can’t help but assume
I’m right.
By the look in your eyes
you have legitimate gripes.
I kill, for example
as naturally as I change
shirts and rehydrate.
In a body of proliferating
data streams
we need people around us
but they’re often wrong.
Ergo: Huckleberry Finn.
Ergo: Hester Prynne.
Mine say clean up:
get rid of the diapers and dishes and dog shit,
the unwanted children, the old
and crazy, inappropriate
and recently arrived;
the blunders of desire, the plastic, the mercury
the blood of history. Me—
I drink it.
I like the messy
weight of it inside me.
I gulp from the fountain
until my belly bulges and I walk
gingerly. Still
I know
I should have picked up the phone
when I had the chance.

Whatever Happened to Them? (ten couples we used to know)

1

He was embarrassed to be caught
without candles
on her birthday
or matches
so he rubbed two sticks together
to light himself on fire.
She watched flames lick up his legs and higher
to his neck and face and her cool hands
touched his burning ones
and they lived for a moment
like that.

2

Like turtles on a log
they sat next to each other all season
until one day she stepped forward and plopped
into the pond and swam away.
He watched her fade into the murk, and grieved
for he’d never seen the bottoms
of her feet before
and he couldn’t yet imagine
his life alone, or how the log beneath him
sloped from the grassy bank down
to touch both water and sky.

3

After he left her
he slid women like rings
over his penis, each large
then shrinking
to make room for the next
until, fever past, his body
faded like a clear idea
and only a smile-shaped
string of plastic dolls connected
one dark planet eye
with the other.

4

Perhaps they never forgave each other
for sneaking so close
but didn’t they say, Please please
please?
Didn’t they tear off their clothes
and jump each other?
Or maybe they bumped their heads
and forgot
how they began: bobbing
at sea with voluptuous hope.
Wind! Lightning! Big waves!
Fun! For soon they tired, searched
for calm, stared across endless water and thought
about throwing each other overboard
and how they used to be
nice people.

5

When the chaos got too much for her
she sat on his head and absorbed him.
For a while we heard
shrieks between her thighs
but he quieted and she
did too, her skin and bones
drying to dust over
the shape of a tiny man
fetal inside her.

6

He opened the old door
and she followed him up stone
ramps built centuries ago for horses and heroes
around and around, breathless past slits like green
eyes opening to olives groves farther
and farther below. When the sky finally
swept blue around the last corner
she saw over the rooftop terrace
and a spread of land fuzzy with heat
the distant line of the sea.
He kissed her, climbed
onto the wall, paused with his skinny arms birdlike
and jumped. For the rest of her life
she watched him fall.

7

The morning she told him
in too many words why she was leaving
he disappeared into silence.
Air filled his shirt and pants.
His empty shoes looked particularly sad
under the table.
When she finally walked out, she left a paper bag
with her heart in it.
He was too afraid to look
and for a long time
hungry, while he finished his coffee
he was hoping it was scones.

8

Because she was planted
among split rocks and ashes—
tended with winter and spite
in the draughty rubble
of the old church—her daisy
grew iron-stemmed, spindly
and brave—oh so brave—
toward the faintest flicker
of sun. From the damp
among peonies he watched,
molted and—oh so moved
—only waited.

9

When one plate of the earth’s crust
slid under another
their pretty house crumbled.
Covered in mud, they snarled
and crawled into their own
separate dark caves, where they re-invented fire
and sleep under fur. We hear
they’re happy now.

10

Dancers, they made themselves
into beautiful shapes and circled
each other, touched and leaned
until their bodies made one.
A pretty bird
fluttered down from the sky
and landed on their shoulder.
For as long as they could, they strained
to hold still.
But one of them moved and the other fell
and the bird flew away.
Years later they woke to hear feathers
ruffling in the dark near their ears. Faces close
they kissed
for they knew it wouldn’t stay.