Revision

Let’s try it again. This time
I won’t be laying stoned in your bed
while you’re putting on your makeup and your dress.

Maybe instead I could put on
your makeup and your dress and we
could kiss and take a picture like running
fingers over the inside surface of our passions.

We could try again on a bridge with a whole
mess of stars, too many to keep
out of our hair.

I’ll fish the shoebox of broken glass out from
under your bed. We’ll build a room to live in
and this time the closet can stay but forget
the handgun at the bottom of the gift bag.

We’ll try it again in a city
with no sharp edges or exits.

There will be balconies and photograph albums.
In every picture we’ll be toasting and our smiles
will look like two champagne glasses clinking together.

I’ll figure out a way
to keep those glasses from running dry if you can stop
bursting them against the walls whenever you get angry.

We can overlook that ugly moment when
I tried to break some boy’s teeth at a party
because I thought he was sleeping with you

and turn it into a magic act
where every shattered thing
gets transfigured into a bird
and nobody gets hurt.

Let’s start over
but this time when we meet eyes
through a crowd I’ll walk away.

We can find our own
street corners to occupy while we pray
for busses to come hit us and when
they don’t come I’ll get lost
and marry whoever finds me.

Her and I will move
to the city. I’ll quit
smoking and drink less.

You’ll be somewhere else
for a little while, getting happier

every day until one particular thursday
when I find you at the corner grocer
picking out flowers, running fingers
over the inside surface of their petals.

I’ll say, “It’s strange peonies
never seem to be in season here”
and you won't say anything,
just pick up some lilies
and smile at me while you
walk out into the crowded afternoon.

~1

Some nights you just want to smoke

and think about all the exceptional kissers you've known. 

Epitaph for Children I Don't Have

My children drowned:

a boy and a girl

not even born but that couldn’t stop it.

The cold lake was a place I had been.
I was returning. The white veils fixed
over their two faces, fogged breath
on a mirror that couldn’t help but
give back the world. My bare

feet on the broken bank beside
several small shells
that were all tokens
of special varieties of grief.

My drowned children: I have lost
            you, familiar as the water returning
            in brackish conversation between
            tributary and tide, I have lost you

not once but twice.
To the deep, then to the morning
when you never were.

You had a mother. When I pulled you
from the water of myself onto the shore
of myself, my breath frosted the mirrors
of your faces and they could not help

but return two images: hers and my own.

You had a mother, but perhaps
no progenitor more real than
the guilt that pushed
your small bones out
of my pores like sweat.

If I had spoken to her
of you, she would not have known
the names that together we gave you.

The news of your deaths
would have broken upon her as an empty wave.

This world a repository for small
sadnesses, cast earthward.
This world that turns up
empty palms in recompense
for all we have interred,
a gesture feeling of forgiveness
until the very moment
it does not.

Drowned children
the news of your two deaths
first in water, then in morning
might have appeared to her as
gift or blessing: the prophecy

of a future wound from which
to carry the relief of never having.

But a morning arrives full

of empty beds and bedrooms like palms

upturned to demonstrate how little they hold

and a night comes when you return

to the water and find it filled with your

children. Children who you pull from
the lake until the lake runs dry and you
are standing alone in its chalk center.

Above,
there is the moon and she wears

her white veil and drowns in the sky.

Below,
the dry banks replete with the bodies
of things you never had to lose.

There will be nothing else.