Seven Months After
3/24/17

I wasn't supposed to see that photo,
but there you are,
on your mother's Facebook profile,
standing on a sidewalk in Florida
(as usual with running
sneakers outrageous
colors:
this time orange).
No, tangerine.
With mimosa trees feathering behind you
And your sunglasses colored like golden syrup.

I hunger for you.

The line of your leg is unbearably
sleek (I know),
and your ankle is curved and thin so that I can't figure out
how it holds up your calf --
that muscle, gleaming in the sunlight,
swinging down to the bone where it
attaches to the joint like some trapeze artist.
Poised.
Then powder-blast of the hands hitting the bar --

and your chest is high: somehow I am only
just noticing this,
though my palms (neck, cheek) must have known it.

And I love -- still --
your sharp clean line of shoulders
where now a cotton shirt, so thin, is barely settling
but skims: it wants to be free and skip in the
Miama wind
and it bats against your skin
so that I can see the steep incline
of your torso
in this
too-still photo.
(I know that shirt, folded it with my hands.)
And I think:

you are beautiful,
painted blue.

But more than this:
What are you holding in your
slightly-pinched fingers?
At what are you smiling
(your teeth like a conch shell) --
something outside the range of the camera? --
not me.
Not thinking of me?

I wish I was wearing a sarong flapping in that wind;
I wish I was just out of range;
I wish I was the sun
reflected in your face,
melting those glasses to syrup,
unveiling those teeth, white as a shell.

* * * * * * * *

Remembering Advice
While Cooking
From An Old Woman I Met
On a Country Walk
7/19/2017

You will think of him
at odd times,
she said.

And I do: taking the glass jar
down from the cabinet,

unscrewing the top,
inhaling the
sun-dried tomatoes
until they fill me with the
sharpness of red.

And in the starling's
wing, she said.

In the slope of a
house roof line or

a door ajar, or the

color of meringue

the taste of cider on your
tongue.

A hillbilly's accent, I
thought, a FedEx truck,
a 50's love song, or
too much ice
cream
slipping from the
cup,
the treat
about
to fall
my heart about
to shatter.

In eagerness for life.

It will lessen, she
said, but

it will never end.

Now my dinner is done: my
quinoa swollen to spirals.

I want to eat it

from the pot, with a spoon
and porcini e shroomami
and the sun-dried tomatoes
hot
and damp.

I threw in peanuts for a prank.

"So cold," he
had whispered to me,
"and so sweet,"

on our last night.
And I wrote about
it, and The New York Times
rejected it today.

I came to Vermont
to write. On my first
evening I said to no one:

"Dear,
I want to
tell you
that my bedroom
is a pale
celery color,

that I can hear the chime
of a maritime clock
and there is a summer rain
outside, car tires
swishing by on the
country street. I am
close to the village. It
is dark. Love, I do

not even know to
whom I am talking."

"Be generous to your reader
and don't over-
share," I was
told.

So I over-share to
friends instead:
texts about the clock, the
raindrops. I stop myself
before I say the word
"celery".
I'm in my pajamas,
cherry-red on
sheets so-starched,
and my world is sprawled

on the pinewood floor:
a stack of library
books (Mary
Oliver, word-knight Nabokov),
and my gray duffel bag,
and a satchel full of notebooks.

The ding of my
phone keeps loneliness
just outside
the gate. I make
a poem and
remember I
am a farmer,
here to harvest language.

That was good: I feel better.
And now this tomato

is filling
me like all of Italy! --

like Assissi,
a shriveled plum in my mouth. Better
than Williams' plum.

Yes, I could share my heart
stin-
gily
and
tell you
I am leaning
over a pot

eating dinner
in Stowe

and

missing

a

human.

But I want to
give more. I take three sips of earthy
port. Vermouth, sorry.
I am just trying
to forget.
To cook, to mix,
to forget. To forget
I'm shaken
to the roots.
He shook me
to the roots.
Vermouth tastes
nutty.
Speak, memory.

Say that the last time I was here --
I will be generous in my way --
I picked up a rock
on this mountain road
for my first sweetheart,
my girlish one.
The last time I was here,
I closed my fist
over its whiteness,
opened it a-
gain and told
him it looked
like
his
soul.

I said that. It was
crystal and
cloudy and glitzy
with diamonds
and naughty like coal
in places, murky
and sweet in
others, and this is life
the old woman told me,
this is life,
this is life

this is
life

this is.