Two Poems

I’m Always Here, Except When I’m Not

It all continues,
walking into a rainy night
burning the archives

like the Romantics
in the Province of Opposites.
This is about undoing

the projection. It’s about
whether this carries on
without us.

At least the small owl
in the woods
is not a barred subject. Well,

it is and it isn’t. Regarding
the ability to be here, I have
mysterious instructions

to recite a poem
known well enough
to lift the falling

black curtains.
Who? Secrets,
I feel their hands

at my throat.
I have been trying
to make them go away.

Phew. You are sad
you’re away, I think.
It’s so wide in there

without me,
saying these words
about the invisible.

Now, I do not wish
to say goodbye but
I’ve a chest to quiet,

eyes to close,
and the raindrops
are starting to freeze.

Hawk & Hare

Whenever you say
my name, it sounds
like the sweetest,
most vocative,

masculine singular.
You save it
for the precise moment
you give yourself away.

You want to kneel
so badly. You are dying
to get out in the open
because it matters to you

to tell the truth. You fall apart
in darkness — I open my stitches.
We are descendants
of disgust and prayer

working our divorces
from the sky
to disorganize toward life.
We try to keep to ourselves

the daily falling apart.
We seek what gives us
the slip — we lie in bed
and wiggle for it.

The earth still moves
by the bumpy postal services
of love and sex. You,
who have many impulses:

in each, an actuary.
We practice this position
called Hawk & Hare
and somewhere

in our mission
to unproductively synthesize
and look happily
into each other,

we are so naked,
so troubled in shape,
our bodies become
unrecognizable.